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The Clock Stopped: Amazingly, Cheetolini has done the right thing about vaping

Trumplethinskin has said the FDA should ban “flavoured” vaping products.  His “ban”, however, is only against flavoured nicotine packs, not vaping in general.  That won’t be affected, not when Altria (formerly Philip Morris) invested US$1.2 billion in Juul and invested who-knows-how-many millions on republicans.  The FDA has sent out warning letters to Juul and others, holding them accountable for their actions.  Now let’s see Annoying Orange do something about enacting gun control.

The owners of Juul were liars from the beginning.  Their “flavoured” poison was always aimed at children, despite their lies and denials.  Every examination of their advertising confirms this.  They used “barely legal” 19 years olds to market vaping to kids, in much the same way pornographers market “barely legal” 19 years olds to middle aged men.  The FTC has fined google US$170 million for targeted advertising aimed at children and data collection, but the this should include a ban on all nicotine-based products online, the same way all tobacco advertising has been banned from TV, radio and print media.

The number of nicotine addicts worldwide went from five million in 2011 to nearly fifty million today, thanks in large part to advertising to children, and to addicts’ rationalizations of their selfish behaviour.  They say, “I’m not smoking, I’m vaping!” as they smoke in places where it’s illegal or on private property where the owners don’t allow smoking.

“Vaping devices” are nothing more than portable hookah pipes, and the addicts are vaper brains.  It’s still smoking, and it’s still toxic both to the user and the environement (re: plastic waste, batteries).  All tobacco products should be banned since they are a massive contributor to climate change and toxification of farmland. Once land has been used for growing tobacco, you can’t grow food there. It’s single crop farming, not rotational, so the soil becomes depleted of nutrients and desertification begins without massive overuse of fertilizers and pesticides. The tobacco plant is one species that humans should try to render extinct or at least criminalize its use outside of science.

 

 

 

 

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Comments

  1. says

    Why it should be impossible to grow food on land where tobacco was grown? I cannot find any reason why crop rotation should be impossible for tobacco.
    I think that growing tobacco as a single crop is more about greed than a must – tobacco just brings in more money in the short-term, and nobody cares about the long-term. It is similar to rapeseed where I live, it too is grown in succession to a point when the soil is completely depleted and starts to erode.
    I do not think banning the stuff would work though, it won’t anymore than banning marihuana or alcohol did.

    • says

      Farmers stopped using nicotine as an insecticide because many plants absorb it and it gets into the food chain. Soil can also absorb it.

      From another source:

      Tobacco ruins soil and water along Matamuhuri River, Bangladesh

      Tobacco cultivation in Bangladesh has always been river-based to exploit the fertile soil.

      […]

      Tobacco cultivation has been expanded in Bangladesh, not due to increased interest of the farmers, but to appropriate fertile lands, source of fuel woods and water accessible for the tobacco industry. Fertile soil condition is an important factor for quality tobacco leaf production. British American Tobacco Company (BATC) started tobacco cultivation in Rangpur district in the fertile Teesta silt in the early 1970s, later on moved to Kushtia in the fertile land of the Gangetic Flood plain and then to the Chittagong Hill Tracts mostly for the fertile riverbeds of river Matamuhuri and the trees in the hill forest (Akhter 2011). In essence, the expansion of tobacco production is a corporate grabbing of fertile land, forests for fuel woods and water, for which investors had to pay nothing.

      Tobacco, Nicotiana tabacum, grown as a monocrop, needs various kinds of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and fungicides to curb the growth of diseases and persistent weeds. The plant extracts nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium from the soil more rapidly than other crops – a problem exacerbated by practices such as topping and suckering that promote the concentration of nicotine in the plant’s leaves. Tobacco is not merely a plant, but a toxic industrial technology.