DAVID MARCUS: Biden’s war on cigarettes belongs on the ash heap

In the last days of his failed presidency, President Joe BidenThe US Food and Drug Administration is embarking on a senseless and dangerous plan to ban the sale of cigarettes in the United States. This must never be allowed.

The cheeky scheme of Washington geniuses is to reduce the level of nicotine in a cigarette to an almost imperceptible level, rendering the product almost useless. Note that nicotine itself is mostly harmless, but our bureaucratic officials find the lethal delivery of cigarettes too dangerous, even with high taxes and warning labels. So, like many illiberal pencil pushers before them, their plan is simply to ban it.

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There are four fundamental reasons why this regulatory trampling of cigarettes, a product which, by the way, has been associated with our people for centuries, must never take root.

First and foremost, my choice to smoke and the choice of over 25 million regular American adult smokers is none of Biden’s damn business. We all know it’s dangerous. It’s not 1950 and celebrities aren’t doing TV commercials about which brand of smoke four out of five doctors prefer.

Of course, it is a choice with negative health consequences. But the same goes for obesity, drinking alcohol or not exercising.

The difference is that smokers, for reasons I’ve never fully understood, are treated like moral reprobates. No one would ever walk up to a fat guy eating a Big Mac and say, “What’s wrong with you, buddy? Can’t you see what you’re doing?” This happens regularly to smokers in public.

But even if one is a narrow-minded authoritarian who thinks the state should get in the way of my after-dinner smoke, beware of unintended consequences. Which brings us to reason #2, the obvious invitation to the black market this policy creates.

The economic opportunities for criminal organizations here are simply huge, and tobacco smuggling is already a big problem in our country. Fortunately, so far it has only been domestic.

Typically, smugglers will fill trucks with cheap cigarettes from low-tax states like Virginia or Indiana and sell them at a discount in high-tax states like New York or Illinois. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, three stores within five blocks of my house sold packs of cigarettes for $9 instead of the legal price of $15, and they always had Virginia tax stamps.

This de facto national cigarette ban would, for the first time, introduce international smugglers into the United States cigarette market, and that’s the third reason why this FDA plan is so completely insane.

“Biden’s ban is a gift with a bow and balloons organized crime cartels with him, be it cartels, Chinese organized crime or the Russian mafia. “It’s going to make America smoke and it’s going to make the streets more violent,” Rich Marianos, former assistant director of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and current chairman Tobacco Law Enforcement Networkhe told Fox News Digital about the proposal.

This is an obvious truth that we have known since Prohibition a century ago. What makes this iteration so much worse is that now Mexican cartels will be smuggling foreign cigarettes, many of which are Chinese counterfeits, while cracking down on fentanyl and human trafficking at the border.

The fourth and final reason why smokers are outraged by this proposed infringement on their rights is that it seems like every 10 minutes a new marijuana store opens on some street corner in America.

All big cities in our country smell like a Grateful Dead concert or Snoop Dog’s den, I mean at 9 in the morning.

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Isn’t it interesting that the government advocates marijuana smoking, which makes people lazy and indulgent, but rages against tobacco smoking and even nicotine, which I believe has sharpened the senses of Americans since Sir Walter Raleigh first took a puff?

Future President Dwight D. Eisenhower smoked four packs of cigarettes a day while leading American troops during World War II. Thank God he didn’t stomp hard instead.

It seems very likely that the FDA had good intentions when it came up with this debacle of a plan, but wasn’t that the problem of the entire Biden administration? Biden’s good intentions, once realized, continue to make things worse, from the economy, to the border, to Afghanistan, and now tobacco.

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As smokers, we will pay taxes through our noses, we will swallow taunts that we smell like smoke, we will be driven to icy streets, and on those corners of bars or restaurants we will be happy while sharing cigarettes with the stories of our lives.

The government will never take that away from smokers, and hopefully, as saner and saner heads come to head President-elect Donald Trump’s FDA, they never will.

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