The Biden administration said Friday it would again delay a decision on a regulation aiming to ban menthol-flavored cigarettes, citing the “historic attention” and “immense amount of feedback” on the controversial proposal by the Food and Drug Administration.
“This rule has garnered historic attention and the public comment period has yielded an immense amount of feedback, including from various elements of the civil rights and criminal justice movement,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement.
This looks like an example of relative privation. There’s no way for us to all agree on what’s a “good” cause. There are so many things people fight for, so many wrongs to right. We’ll never agree on the one that’s the worst, and if that’s the only metric we use for problem solving - that we solve the worst problem we can, and only that problem, we’ll end up spending our time trying to solve the problem of what problem to solve and never actually do anything.
The reality is that we can work on many things at once. We can push something that will have a decent impact, such as attempting to cut cigarette consumption, while ALSO working on homelessness, famine, fascism, etc.
I’ll happily engage with you on why banning cigarettes may not be a good idea, but it’s not because we could be better spending our time on other “more important” matters.
Enacting legislation requires time and resources, it isn’t a cost-free activity. If you are spending those resources on one thing, you are reducing the ability to use them on other things, so you have to be strategic.
Banning menthol cigs is a very bad use of those resources. Consumers in general hate bans. If those bans aren’t universal, they just create resentment in the population and incentives for people to create alternatives that in many cases are just as bad or worse.
In an election year where the Democratic party already is not in a strong position, it is idiotic to waste precious resources pushing for a ban on menthol cigs.
The utilitarian argument doesn’t work; smoking rates across demographics have been steadily declining for decades. And menthol cigs are not drastically more addictive or dangerous than any other cigarettes.
The popular demand argument doesn’t work either, because there aren’t large swaths of the voter base that are calling for menthol cigs to be banned.