Health - Resources and discussion for everything health-related

"Gimme a drink that burns like fuck going down and tastes like old wood."

"Here's your whiskey. And for you, sir?"

"I want the same burning, but can mine taste like pine sol?"

"Here's your gin."

Old people do be eatin that liver at the diner tho

I didn't know that, but I'm cynically unsurprised.

A curious fact adjacent to that:

The US tobacco settlement is still ongoing. Each year, tobacco companies have to pay a particular amount of money to state governments, nominally to help offset the societal costs of smoking.

The total amount of the payments made to a specific state in a specific year depends on the number of cigarettes sold in that state the previous year. Not tobacco products in general, but cigarettes specifically.

It's safe to assume that that's relevant.

True, I tend to forget i’m more of the exception than the norm. I don’t just do things at the drop of a hat, especially if it costs a lot of money or could have long-standing repercussions, and I never would have rebelled against my parents. I don’t know how the people that do these things get by from day-to-day, it’s gotta be tough!

Vaping has been under attack since day one. If you put the legwork and trace every law made that targets vaping, the “Yay”s voting are all lobbied by… you got it. Big Tobacco Companies. Philip Morris, British American, etc etc.

I’m all for regulation, but this is made intentional. I won’t be surprised if Big Tobacco are rubbing their greedy little hands that the next wave nicotine hooked people are now their customers.

Once you start seeing the huge financial incentives to keeping people smoking cigarettes specifically, you can't unsee it. From tobacco companies, sure, but also from state governments. State governments get a large amount of revenue from cigarette smokers. And for many of the more financially mismanaged ones, that revenue pays off debts that would otherwise leave them insolvent.

Article from 2008. It wasn't just mortgages that were being "securitized", Wall Street managed to sell state governments on securitizing their payouts from the tobacco company Master Settlement Agreement. States sold those payments to Wall St for pennies on the dollar to get a quick infusion of cash, and now they owe and they can only keep paying if people keep smoking cigs.

Article from 2014, when the e-cig boom was starting. you can see how concerning the loss of revenue is.

So you get an unholy alliance between tobacco companies (who yes, own a lot of vape brands but see higher margins from traditional cigarettes) and state governments. Throw in the stupid parents having a moral panic, and the conclusion is obvious: ban vapes, leave cigarettes.

Well, Altria also has a stake in NJOY and I think at one point had a stake in BLU. All of which I’ve found at pretty much every gas station I’ve been to in the US. The only reason I’m picking on Altria is that I’m both a customer as well as a stock holder and am somewhat familiar with them as a result.

Most of the brands I’ve seen in vape shops however seem to be out of Shenzhen, China and I haven’t been able to find out much about them.