A couple of weeks ago, I
noted that if the FDA chooses to regulate cigars it could
decide to follow New York City’s
asinine example by banning flavored varieties because they
supposedly encourage kids to smoke. Last week five
senators—Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.),
Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.),
and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.)—urged
the FDA to do just that:

As teenagers turn to cigars instead of cigarettes, these
products pose a serious threat to public health and threaten to
undermine the important public health protections of the Family
Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. 

Flavored cigars are putting children’s health at risk and
increasing nicotine addiction and tobacco use among young people.
More than 13 million Americans smoke cigars, including an estimated
1.8 million high school students and 475,000 middle school
students….Cigars with candy-like flavorings such as strawberry,
watermelon, vanilla and chocolate attract kids to smoking and help
hook them on this addictive habit.

Congress helped protect young people from the harmful effects of
tobacco by banning flavored cigarettes. But as youth cigarette use
has fallen, cigars have become more popular among adolescents.

The notion that adult products cannot be tolerated if they might
appeal to children—which is also the premise
underlying the statutory ban on flavored cigarettes and the
agitation against sweet-tasting alcoholic beverages—is offensive to
anyone who thinks the government should not treat adults like
children. It is also an open-ended license to ban all potentially
hazardous products, since adult things appeal to kids precisely
because they are marks of adulthood. Even if we ignore these
concerns, Durbin et al. offer zero evidence, aside from bald
assertion, that flavored cigars are particularly popular among
minors. Not that the lack of evidence will necessarily be an
impediment: Congress banned flavored cigarettes even though they
accounted
for a tiny percentage of underage consumption. The one exception
was menthol,
which by some crazy coinicidence is the one flavor that remains
legal, thanks to legislation that Durbin himself championed (as
Michael Siegel
points out), along with Philip
Morris, which sells menthol varieties of several different
brands.

Nor do the five senators back up their claim that “cigars have
become more popular among adolescents” in recent years as cigarette
smoking has declined. That is not what government-sponsored surveys
show. According to the CDC’s
Youth Risk Behavior Survey (PDF), past-month consumption
of “cigars, cigarillos, or little cigars” by high school students
declined from 1997 until 2005, then remained steady through 2009
(the latest year for which data are available). The Monitoring
the Future Study, which is conducted by researchers at the
University of Michigan under contract with the National Institute
on Drug Abuse, found that past-year consumption of “small cigars”
by 12th-graders fell from 23.1 percent in 2010 to 19.5 percent in
2011. Both of these numbers are substantially lower than the rates
found by several
surveys (PDF) conducted in 1996. In short, Durbin and his
colleagues seem to be making shit up.

[via The
Rest of the Story]