Florida's Governor is grumbling about moves from the Joe Biden administration that could prohibit the sale of menthol cigarettes.
"I would reverse that policy. I think it's ridiculous what Biden's doing," Ron DeSantis said on Wednesday's WFEA's Morning Update with Drew Cline.
The White House hasn't yet committed to the menthol ban, it should be noted, but it's a priority of the Food and Drug Administration.
The Florida Governor cast aspersions at prohibition, saying that "things that have been legal for a long time, when you try to take it out, then there ends up just being a black market."
A few years back, DeSantis vetoed a bill that would have raised the age to buy tobacco to 21 that would have also banned "liquid nicotine" products, contending at the time that would have empowered the "hazardous black market."
During Wednesday's interview, he made similar points about that bill, using the menthol moment to defend the rights of people to embrace vapes for smoking cessation purposes.
"If somebody goes from cigarettes to vape, it actually is much less damaging than doing the normal cigarettes. So these people were addicted to nicotine, this is what they had. And if you would have allowed that bill to go in, a lot of them probably would have gone back to cigarettes. That would have been totally counterproductive," DeSantis said, eliding the fact that in this case, menthol is primarily used for the cigarettes he calls "damaging."
The Governor's main beef is with "an administrative bureaucracy deciding it wants to ban something ... a runaway bureaucracy that decides it does like this or doesn't like that and you can't vote those bureaucrats out of office."
The Governor isn't alone among Florida politicians in his position. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio wrote a letter to the FDA in July warning that banning these products from being sold legally could lead to the black market filling in the holes. U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz argues that a menthol ban could lead to Hamas and Hezbollah filling the market void by trafficking the banned product.
Though DeSantis' enthusiasm for menthol cigarettes is now on the record, it arguably contradicts his belief that cannabis should be banned, in part because he doesn't like the "stench."
"What I don't like about it is if you go to some of these places that have done it, the stench when you're out there, I mean, it smells so putrid," he told reporters in 2022. "I could not believe the pungent odor that you would see in some of these places. I don't want to see that here. I want people to be able to breathe freely."
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