(You can listen to this column, read by the author, here.)
I get tired of all the double standards.
When The Little Mermaid swims around half naked, singing to her underwater friends, she is “sweet” and “beautiful.” But when I do it, people say I’m “drunk” and “no longer welcome at the aquarium.”
Modern society often makes knowing when you’re acting hypocritically difficult. I mean, burn a body at a crematorium, you’re “doing a good job.” Do it at home you’re “destroying evidence.” It’s just hard to know when people are going to get upset and throw the double-standard flag at you.
So, of course, I’ve got a great deal of sympathy for the Denver City Council and its bizarre inconsistent hypocrisy between cannabis and tobacco.
Denver has more marijuana dispensaries than Starbucks locations. The amount of money they make off cannabis taxes is substantial. And those cannabis products are flavored in the form of gummies, candies, and cookies. These products are proudly peddled in their town.
But, like mandating motorcycle riders wear helmets while outlawing seat belts, the very same council is embarrassed tobacco products, like flavored nicotine products, are legally sold in their fentanyl-fueled, psychedelic mushroom-hazed, Cheech and Chong-themed city.
So, it’s only logical they recently banned flavored, smokeless tobacco products but not flavored cannabis products. Duh, it just makes sense.
Flavored nicotine products are far less harmful than smoking and deliver the nicotine smokers want without the damaging carcinogens of setting stuff on fire and inhaling the smoke. Thus, these products are crucial for folks trying to stop smoking.
The best way to keep people smoking is to ban these products, which is what Denver just did.
Their reasoning? Flavored smokeless nicotine will become children’s gateway to smoking tobacco. But somehow flavored cannabis products like gummies isn’t a gateway to smoking marijuana.
If you don’t understand that simple, flawless logic then you are obviously not smart enough to be a policymaker for an entire city.
According to testimony from last week’s Denver City Council meeting, the tax loss from this ban could be more than $13 million per year.
Good thing Denver is running out of money at the right time.
The economic value is so important to the region the state of Colorado bent over backward to tempt the makers of Zyn, a popular smokeless nicotine product, to locate their massive production factory near Denver. So, why wouldn’t Denver return the favor by outlawing the same product?
I think we can agree there is no more burning issue than smokeless nicotine products. We’ve seen protests and violent rallies around the city and county building of people demanding Denver make it harder to quit smoking. It made the BLM riots look boring; Jan. 6, 2021, look like a quilting party.
Just how much do the people of Denver want flavored nicotine outlawed? At my organization, Independence Institute, we were curious and commissioned a poll of Denver voters. The polling firm surveyed 459 people to find which of a dozen issues facing the city were most important.
Banning nicotine products didn’t make it into the top three. Heck, it didn’t make it into the top 11. In fact, not a single person said it was an issue. Not one.
The most important issues to Denver voters are affordable housing (33.5%), public safety (15.6%), taxes and city spending (14.2%) and illegal immigration (12.9%).
Again, out of the 12 issues offered, flavored nicotine products came in last with a whopping 0.0%. No wonder it’s a council priority.
Let’s see if we have a grasp of the full picture here: flavored nicotine products help people stop smoking by giving them a much, much healthier way to consume nicotine.
We gave sizable tax incentives for Zyn to be manufactured here, beating out other cities and states who were wooing the company.
Sales of this product bring in multiple millions of dollars in tax revenue at a time of budget shortfalls.
No one thinks this is an issue — no one.
So, the Denver City Council banned these flavored products that do help people stop smoking tobacco while not banning flavored marijuana products that don’t help people stop using cannabis.
Denver voters, you elected the smartest people in the world. Next, instead of fixing potholes they are going to outlaw exercise equipment.
Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.
