Why it’s politically impossible to ban menthol cigarettes, even if they’re the most addictive.
Indulge me in a thought experiment. Pretend that drinking something called "lethalcoffee" has been found to cause cancer. There are five or six kinds of gross-flavored lethalcoffees that hardly anyone drinks, like chocolate, cherry, banana, and vanilla. But there's one flavor, mint, that 30 percent of all lethalcoffee drinkers are hooked on. And there's one particular group of lethalcoffee drinkers—let's call them investment bankers—who drink mint lethalcoffee like there's no tomorrow.
Allow 40 years for several million lethalcoffee-related deaths to pile up before the pandemic is taken seriously by the government. (Try to put aside any negative feelings you harbor about investment bankers.) Finally, Congress introduces a Lethalcoffee Safety Act that has a chance of becoming law. Would you imagine that law would:
A) Order the FDA to regulate lethalcoffee but withhold from the agency the power to ban it?
B) Ban every flavor of lethalcoffee except mint, the one most people drink?
C) Make it really hard for people to sell badcoffee, a new but much less hazardous cousin of lethalcoffee?
D) Be co-authored by Starbucks (SBUX)?
Links:
[1] http://www.theroot.com/users/paulsmalera
[2] http://www.theroot.com/print/13703
[3] http://www.theroot.com/printmail/13703
[4] http://www.theroot.com/views/cool-refreshing-legislation-philip-morris
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[8] http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=postto&t=Cool, Refreshing Legislation for Philip Morris&u=http://www.theroot.com/views/cool-refreshing-legislation-philip-morris
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[12] http://www.theroot.com/search/quotemedia/SBUX
[13] http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/judgments/2009/06/08/cool-refreshing-legislation-philip-morris
[14] http://www.theroot.com/views/open-letter-michelle-obama
[15] http://www.theroot.com/views/what-single-women-can-learn-michelle
[16] http://www.theroot.com/views/working-man-when-you-are-man
[17] http://www.theroot.com/views/Politics
[18] http://www.theroot.com/category/views-tags/ban-menthol-cigarettes
[19] http://www.theroot.com/category/views-tags/cigarettes
[20] http://www.theroot.com/category/views-tags/smoking
[21] http://www.theroot.com/category/views-tags/tobacco
[22] http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&bkmk=http://www.theroot.com/root-100/2010/janelle-mon-e&title=Cool, Refreshing Legislation for Philip Morris
[23] http://www.theroot.com/views/audrey-smaltz
[24] http://www.theroot.com/views/eddie-longs-coronation
[25] http://www.theroot.com/views/top-5-whitney-houston-performances