Fundies/Puritans win again - A Fond Farewell to Candy Cigarettes

A Fond Farewell to Candy Cigarettes

Today is the first day of an America without candy cigarettes. Banned by a smoking prevention law prohibiting candy and "fruit-flavored" cigarettes, the badass big brother of the Pez dispenser is officially contraband.

To bid farewell to the easiest-way-to-give-your-mom-a-heart-attack treat of yore, here is Indonesia's famous smoking baby. I'm not sure if he's a cautionary tale, a counterexample, or a nonsequitur. He may not know what candy cigarettes are, but if he does, he probably thinks they are a cruel joke.

I remember the days when my I'd walk up and down the cul-de-sac "smoking" with my neighbors until the childless divorcée everyone called "the witch" (were we sexist, or did she actually practice black magic?) would open her window and scream at us to stop smoking, or she'd tell our parents. Then we'd shove our cigarettes in our mouths and chew—in retrospect, a terrible precedent for children would grow up thinking swallowing stuff is a smart way to get out of trouble.

Good-bye, candy cigarettes. Like pagers, pay phones, and smoking indoors—you had a good run, but the times have simply passed you by.

http://gawker.com/5571172/a-fond-farewell-to-candy-cigarettes

Don't like something? Want others to follow your beliefs? They won't convert? Protect them - save them from their own sinful selves. Tax their behavior or make it illegal (Oh, and make sure to tell them "You don't need to do that anyway, so don't complain when we save you").

America, land of the at one time free.

"The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves in their separate, and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere." - Lincoln

Like Prohibition or banning cell phone use in restaurants, this is one of the worse aspects of progressivism.

banning of "candy cigarettes" ... what with their being in bed with the tobacco industry ...

Next up ought to be the junk "happy meals" and kid's movie "tie in" toys and trinkets.

...common sense decision, hardly big brother like the faux libertarians here would like to claim.

What other things do we need to ban to protect people? Fast food places? Soda? Car exhaust? Running AC units in the summer because they use too much electricity?

I'll take freedom of choice any day over draconian laws that limit choice.

But hey, some people hate pro-choice. Me, I am not one of them and I am for it.

Some will say though 'If you don't want an abortion, then don't have sex in the first place' etc.

Let's only teach abstinence while we are at it.

Hence, my characterization of them as being very much like children.

and abortion.

You are seriously advocating laws against things like this? Really? You want to control the lives and choices of others that much?

from developing harmful and addictive behaviors.

Though we also extend those to say, weight limits for people on exercise equipment.

Or helmets for kids on bikes or at skate parks. Etc.

This is a mis-read of the law.

another piece of my childhood, gone

I can still taste the gummy starchy sugar... oh yeah, they didn't really didn't taste that great after all

one, two puffs and it was out!

Will you support selling candy crack, perhaps, or candy versions of heroin or cocaine? Candy versions of dangerous substances encourage adult consumption of those substances. I'm not saying I would vote for such a law, necessarily, but I understand the mindset behind it, and it's not evil to ban encouragement of bad behavior.

As for "candy crack", I think it is safe to say that we can trust the market to regulate such a thing. Any candy maker who marketed such a product would receive so much bad publicity that they would pull it off the shelves.

I actually don't think there is much of a connection if any between candy cigarettes and actual smoking.

Myself, I don't think it's very much interference. Candy sellers can simply market a different form of their product. No law is prohibiting them from making money. Nothing denies them a chance to sell and market their product to children. The law only denies the candy manufacturers from making faux cigarettes out of their product, as it may cause children to imitate their parents who are engaging in what is undeniably unhealthy behavior. They can still sell their product, so the actual level of government interference - and it is interference which conflicts with actual freedom - seems pretty limited to me.

Now, if the people are unhappy with such a law, the people still have the opportunity to vote out those horrible liberals, but this is a law intended to reduce harm, and I think that's the very purpose of law. This is intended to stop selling a product which may (or may not) encourage kids to smoke when they become older, and it can't be denied that cigarette smoking is harmful behavior (and I should admit at this point that I myself engage in this behavior). You call that "nanny government," and I call it a law passed for the right reasons. But I'm on the left.

Remember a few years ago when gun manufacturers came out with colored handguns? Only a reckless sociopath would make a deadly weapon look like a toy that could make a child believe it was a toy and end up killing someone. But the mindless NRA defended the colored weapons citing the second amendment rights. If it was up to them every citizen would be allowed to have machine guns, tanks, land mines, surface-to-air missiles and nuclear weapons, after all the word 'arms' in the second amendment doesn't define what a weapon is. So it could mean anything. There has to be limits in a civilized society or it would turn into a purely predatory environment, even worse than it is now.

Stupid nannyist bullshit.

just imagine a pack of ankle-biters, cutting their candy cocaine with a Pokemon card and then snorting it up through a rolled up Barney sticker.

Sid

Good lord...this point is being overlooked.

by crushing smarties in a bag. Good stuff. It didn't make me want to shove the real stuff up my nose.

Sid

And only once. Image hot pokers in your eyes, while at the same time you're coughing and gagging and trying to claw your throat out. Then multiply it by ten - that's how shitty it was.

It was one of the gawd-awfullest experiences I ever had, and it made me never, ever, ever want to try snorting anything else.

It was called "Pixy Stix"..... white powder in a straw, right?

And also used as a means of murder in 1974 by Ronald Clark O'Bryan.

Killed his own kid with cyanide for insurance money? That bastard's in the same circle of Hell where the child molesters go. :grr:

I remember when that happened, too (we lived just miles from that part of town.) I don't really understand how people can think that way or come to such a conclusion, but they do :(

He also "killed" Halloween for kids and parents for years after it.

but then shouldn't we ban toy pistols, rifles, swords, ray-guns, light sabers (oops, almost wrote tasers)...?

I always found it funny that a "popular" candy was "baby bottle pop" ... kids who are trying to not look like "babies" buying things which look like you're doing baby things ...

It's bad for everyone and should be discouraged.

Most smoking bans are passed by groups composed of diverse people.

Remember this guy?



Rev. Wright is a pastor in the United Church of Christ, the denomination that is the trinitarian descendant of the Puritan church. (There are Unitarians too -- not to be confused with Unitarian-Universalists.)

The Puritan strain of American Christianity has a long tradition of being progressive, in the good and bad senses of the word: campaigning for abolition, suffrage, and peace, but also for prohibition and clamping down on victimless crimes.

But then, libertarian sorts are always childlike in their attitudes toward responsible public health measures.

It's in their nature- kind of like kids who fuss and holler about bedtimes.

because they refuse to submit to the irrefutable logic of dialectic materialism and class consciousness and persist in saying doody-faced stuff like "people can make up their own minds about things, can't they?".

And, they're juvenile.


ps. :sarcasm:

There should be restriction on companies selling products that have know addictive ingredients that have 0 positive benefits. Sorry people won't be able to sell products to kids that help promote the "safety of cigs. Consumer protection isn't a dirty word. I for one don't think corporations have the freedom to enslave society in addiction for profit.

What's next up - McDonald's straws which the closest equivalent to low tar ciggies ?

they look just like the candy cigarettes in boxes that look like cigarette boxes. someone brought them to the family reunion last year.

And they probably won't stop until every single Pop Rock is gone from the face of the earth


BASTARDS!!!!!!


:mad:

adding red colors and such to them so the police don't shoot your kid dead. Because consumer protection is a good thing and the op ed poster is confusing consumer protection for totalitarianism. I for one don't want to be at the mercy of corporations in the disguise of freedom.

People who worry about candy cigarettes and toy guns.

Cigarettes that taste like candy aren't.

The subtle difference is, apparently, lost on some. :shrug:

This has always been what I've disliked about Progressivism (and it's why I don't call myself a Progressive).

Yes, smoking and drugs are bad. Yes, the Metric system and Daylight Savings Time are good. Progressives have been trying to pass laws prohibiting the former and mandating the latter for a century or more. They have been of dubious success, and have wasted a lot of energy that could have been much better spent elsewhere.

Congress is the wrong instrument for this sort of thing. Progressivism's legacy has been a mixed bag: abolition of slavery (good), women's suffrage (good), Prohibition (bad), the war on drugs (bad). This kind of thing is too Mary Baker Eddy.

I've got more important things to fret over...honestly, guys...

were the wild & crazy kids in my high school. Funny how something they did as kids now gives them the vapors.

dg

Actually, quite stupid.

I haven't seen them in any store anywhere in, I don't know, say 10-15 years? I think they may have been outlawed on the State level here quite awhile ago. I vaguely remember something about it in the news.

why did I click on that link. So much stuff from my childhood, they don't make candy like that anymore. :-(

I'm bookmarking this so I can keep looking. :-)

Contents are highly addictive due to past memories. ;) lol

The world will go on. If kids don't have anything to pretend they are smoking....they'll live.

Wait, wait...."nanny state" comment in 3, 2, 1.....

or helmets- or _______ (pick 'em).

Just because one person's line is drawn in a different place from yours does not mean they're juvenile, or irrational, or any other adjective you're tossing around.

Would you support a law requiring everyone to brush their teeth twice a day?

is every bit as dysfunctional and irrational (from a public health perspective) as opposing seatbelts and helmets.

And morally more reprehensible, as it preys on minds that haven't had the opportunity to develop defense mechanisms against it. Not that everyone matures to the point where they do- but at least, society ought to do what it can to afford the opportunity.

Seat belts and helmets are pieces of safety equipment. You're talking about banning something because you consider it a bad influence. This is more comparable to 1950's parents banning comic books.

nor do comic book publishers and distributors spend billions on expert psychologists.

The health risks engendered are essentially same- and flow from the harmful behaviors being promoted.

Well, not emphysema or smoking-related illnesses. Obesity and diabetes, sure-- but that could be said of all candy. I assume you're not saying we should ban all candy.

Don't make candy mimic cigarettes!

-this in addition to dealing with the advertising and marketing.

So... what, you want to encourage kids to be tobacco smokers? or do you not have any appreciation for well established principles of behavioral psychology?

Everyone I knew growing up ate candy cigarettes as a child, and almost none of them smoke.

Candy cigarettes don't cause kids to be smokers any more than toy pop guns cause kids to shoot people any more than baby dolls cause girls to become mothers.

Hear similar things from shortsighted people all of the time.

They were convinced that they led to delinquent behavior.

I don't like seeing laws written just to enforce someone's view of common sense.

Perhaps if the US had universal health care like everyone else in western industrialized nations you'd grasp what everyone else in industrialized nations already takes for granted.

Unfortunately, due in no small part to the same libertarian streak expressed on this thread- you don't.

More laws = better safer world!

Yeah....I won't be voting for you.

Now I'll have to find something else to give out at Halloween...
:smoke:

someone needs to come up with a sugar patch or an E-candy cigarette to help the kids quit.

Cold Turkey bites.

toy guns over the years... think of the children.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooo.

and candy vibrators too!

I have no problem with this "candy" going away.

El Diablo Bubblegum Cigarettes

Just Like Dad Strawberry Bubblegum Cigarettes

Hobo Bubblegum Cigarettes

Pirate Bubblegum Cigarettes


:evilgrin:

I hadn't seen them since the 1970s, figured they were already long gone.

Come to think of it, I haven't seen that bubble gum that was deliberately packaged like chewing tobacco for a while either. Do they still make that shit?

If you think it is about candy or smoking you have serious issues.

and the inability to get a clue that you don't sell cigarettes to kids- candy or otherwise.

If you want your "candy" you can get it somewhere on the internet if you are really that hard up for it.

when my daughter was born, her older brother took pink bubble gum cigars to school to give out to his friends. He felt good doing this because dad was giving cigars out to his friends.:shrug:

My favorite were the yellow banana-flavored ones....


:7

been "banned"-- is bullshit.

flavored cigarettes have been banned. That is, real cigarettes that taste like chocolate, or cloves, or fruit (anything is better than the flavor they normally come in, i.e. Dog's Ass. But that's just my take) have been banned by the FDA. Now, debate that all you like, up and down, right or wrong.. but that's entirely different than saying that pieces of gum wrapped up to look like smokes- i.e. "candy cigarettes"- are now illegal.


http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm183211.htm




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy_cigarette

It doesn't have to look like a cigarettes.

I smoke and I'm glad that they did this. If it prevents even one kid from getting addicted to cigarettes, then it has served its purpose.

and it tastes better too!

Let me repeat: Candy that looks like a cigarette is just as legal now as it ever was.

The law affects Actual cigarettes--- that taste like candy.


Now, if someone wants to have that argument, fine- personally, I don't see why adults who smoke legal tobacco that tastes like turd shouldn't be free to have it taste like something else. But then fine, argue the actual point.

The article in the OP is at best seriously misinformed, at worst deliberately disingenuous. CANDY CIGARETTES have not been banned, contrary to the implication in the article.

Get it?

not because of any smoking-related concerns, just because they taste like chalk.

But this appears to be more lazy journalism, so oh well.

n/t

but also gum packaged like cigarettes and chocolate candies. I believe these last may have been European. They came in a flat box. The gum came in a more American style cigarette box. The chocolate cigarettes were pretty good if I remember correctly. But you know, I never did take up smoking for all that I had those in my childhood.