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I’m old enough to remember when the ice cream truck sold bubblegum cigarettes that were lined with white powder so it would look like you were puffing a cigarette at first. I vividly remember chasing down the ice cream truck and buying bubblegum cigarettes and my parents never thought twice about how weird that was.
Things have changed, my dudes.
Smoking cigarettes used to be associated with an affluent lifestyle. In movies, TV, and in the pop culture of our grandparent’s generation you’d see the wealthy elite smoking cigarettes through fancy cig holders, like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Don Draper’s character in Mad Men. There’s been a complete cultural shift in the way smokers are viewed in society and when someone’s seen smoking cigarettes on screen they’re no longer the wealthy Hugh Hefner types of yesteryear.
I’m not a smoker anymore. I quit years ago, after college. But from what I’ve gathered, it’s pretty f’n hard to be a smoker these days. Packs of cigarettes are expensive as all hell. You can’t smoke inside pretty much everywhere in the world other than designated smoking lounges. And people look at you like a degenerate for smoking. It will cause cancer.
Things might get a lot worse for smokers in Hawaii if one legislator has his way. He’s seeking to raise the legal age of smokers from 21, which it currently is, to ONE HUNDRED YEARS OLD. This is effectively a complete ban on smoking because the average lifespan in America is only 78.69 years old.
The proposed law, introduced by local Democratic representative Richard Creagan, would effectively amount to a cigarette ban by 2024.
Hawaii already has some of the toughest laws on cigarette sales but Creagan — an emergency room doctor — believes more needs to be done to ban “the deadliest artifact in human history,” according to his proposed bill.
“Basically, we essentially have a group who are heavily addicted — in my view, enslaved by a ridiculously bad industry — which has enslaved them by designing a cigarette that is highly addictive, knowing that it highly lethal. And, it is,” he told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald.
Under current law, you must be 21-years-old to purchase cigarettes in Hawaii. Nationwide, the minimum age is 18 or 19.
Creagan’s proposal calls for raising the cigarette-buying age to 30 by next year, 40 in 2021, 50 in 2022 and 60 in 2023. By 2024, the minimum age would be 100. (via Yahoo!)
At what point do these legislators come out and say ‘just fucking move to Europe already if you want to be a smoker!’ because that’s really the sentiment they’re trying to drive home with this. I was in Barcelona for a week over NYE and I forgot how it’s straight up commonplace there to sit at a cafe on the sidewalk and chain smoke. It took me a few days to adjust to how common smoking was.
Representative Richard Creagan is both a politician and an emergency room doctor. He has a double duty to protect the health of the public. But this seems like a complete stretch. How is it his place to say that cigarettes should be treated more severely than opioids or alcohol? Driving cars cuases more deaths per year than 95% of things on the planet, should he try and outlaw cars next? I don’t actually believe driving is dangerous, I’m just trying to make the point that it’s not his place to suddenly draw a line in the sand that prohibits people from living their lives.
For more on this story, you can click here to visit Yahoo!.