No, there will be no tobacco prohibition, not in the sense of illicit drugs. However, the pressure to quit routine smoking is going to be progressively intense to crushing. We have already undergone massive price increases far disproportionate to inflation or tax increases. Similar to the licensing and maturation requirement history of scotch directed at limiting supply, resourceful gentlepersons will still be able to get quality, but it will be intended to be expensive enough to drive the common away. Already, quality foreign bulk is sputtering to terminal drought. What is available in Europe, with all their socialized regulation, significantly differs from that obtainable in America; the higher the nicotine content, the more difficult to get. Bulk 'stout,' like Class III firearms, will need a commercial license to get, and everything on the consumer level will be domestic tinned from licensed producers. Forget snuff.
FDA is the Tip of the Healthcare Iceberg:
FDA pressure compounded, the big hammer is health care: We are certainly breathing our 'room note;' pipe smokers have five times the incidence of lung cancer and four times the incidence of throat cancer. Insurance companies make no distinction; with a positive hair follicle cotinine test (testable metabolite of nicotine), your health premiums will be even higher than the current more than double, if you can get health insurance at all. For similar reasons, staying employed where the employer pays for health insurance is going to be increasingly a challenge. Those who live with a smoker are subject to the same, minors considered abused. Add that, if you have health insurance, more than the established bias against the poor, infirm, and elderly, your doctor may be unlikely to spend his or her testing and treatment 'capital' on someone perceived as a drug addict trying to commit slow suicide.
Exponential Personal Cost Increases/ Business Decisions/ Personal Responsibility:
In this reddest of red states, with among the highest national rates of tobacco use, you cannot smoke within 150 feet of the building door where candy and salt is all there is to eat on the premises. As obesity is an impediment to employment and advancement, discrimination against tobacco users has been elevated to a just cause, as noted, on the right as well as the left. As discussed in a GLP chronicle, in the tobacco consuming community, there is judgmentalism, one to another. Pipe smoking 'tasters' (some, not all, of course) condescend to 'mainliners,' premium cigar smokers to drug-store, to cigarettes to 'chawers' with their spitting, as unseemly addicts. Even the tobacco industry agrees that Americans need to quit smoking, the American-tobacco-consumption business model abandoned. Besides, why hassle with contingent liabilities? Possibly, Dunhill and other plugs were pulled as business decisions, others yet to be. Our society is dying from obesity, and related to that, meat, sugar, and salt laden foods, but the shadow of unsavory 'substance (drug) addiction' stalks all tobacco use; alcohol (in moderation) grandfathered. Bottom line: Any costs engendered by our (apparently unanimously agreed as indefensible) choice to use tobacco in any form will have to be each person's personal responsibility; the nexus of political agreement of the left and the right.
Drug Addict versus the Finer Things in Life:
An assertion put forth was that since I want nicotine, I'm an addict. May be. Regardless, I'd rather do nothing than a crappy cheap cigar for the nicotine, or a 'smoking mixture' without nicotine, regardless of delivery of that small beer in a gilded hand-crafted 'soulful work of art' stein. I look forward, that looking forward itself life affirming, to my 1792 as a perhaps small but solid satisfying experience of a finer thing in life. Take away the 'fine,' and all that's left is a lot of down with little up.
