So now they are taking away our clove ciggies all together. Fuckin’ A. Because “flavoured cigarettes are marketed to children”. RIGHT. And what is menthol, then? I think that’s a flavour, too, last time I checked. I’d like to see them ban menthol! There’d be riots in the streets. But since there are so few of us who choose to smoke cloves, we have no political power to stop this silly legislation. And it really pisses me off.
No, it’s not about flavour or marketing, it’s about the $1 billion or so that is made here by the Kretek cigarette industry based in Indonesia. The US cigarette makers are suffering losses from the gains made by the anti-smoking lobbies so the easiest thing to do is ban “flavoured” cigarettes which just happen to be imported. Same thing with Sampoerna. They are still available everywhere else but here, but they cut into Philip Morris’ profit margin, so they had to go.
I want to say for the record:
I did not know cloves existed until I was almost 30 years old.
Much less where to find them. The propaganda that cloves and other imports are aimed at “children” is 100% bullshit. I’ll tell you what every teenager starts smoking with: MENTHOL. My first smoke was a Virginia Slims Light Menthol. All the girls smoked them in the 80s. Then it was Benson & Hedges Light Menthol. We’d smoke anything as long as it was FLAVOURED with MENTHOL. So the US cigarette lobby telling us that they are doing it “for the children” is simply a lie. If anything, MENTHOL is the teen bait, NOT CLOVES.
Clove cigarettes are sought out by those of us who are already smokers but want a more exotic flavour. They are expensive and hard to find and the notion that teenagers will go to the trouble is stupid.
This is just more power grabbing by the federal government. More power to dictate what you do with your life. Remember that movie Demolition Man with Sandra Bullock and Sly Stallone? If you don’t, it was in the future where everything was regulated: speech, food, sex, reproduction, everything. Everything was government run and government approved. Salt was not allowed because “it is bad for you”. Cursing was not allowed because it is bad. You might want to rent it just for the critique of too much government. It’s also pretty funny.
I don’t want the government regulating my life. It offends me to think that this is how far away from our roots we’ve drifted. You want to put sin taxes on smokes and booze? Fine. Do it. But don’t dictate to me what brands I’m allowed to buy. It’s WRONG.