Free Republic

Out of all the topics the Joe Biden White House didn’t want to see in Sunday’s Washington Post, this had to be up there on the list. The capital city’s newspaper of record published recordings Sunday of President Joe Biden’s brother, James, engaged in scoring off his famous last name during the late 1990s. The fact that the recordings were made by FBI investigators couldn’t have made things easier in the Biden household either. The Post article was headlined “James Biden’s dealmaking caught on FBI tapes in unrelated bribery probe,” and just the words alone had to be unsettling at...

The Food and Drug Administration will release its official plan to phase out minty tobacco products 'in the coming months', setting the policy up to be implemented in 2024. It first announced that it would ban menthol cigarettes in April 2022 in what would be its most consequential regulatory move against Big Tobacco since 2009 when Congress banned all flavors in cigarettes – save for menthol. Researchers from the American Cancer Society also concluded that the ban led to the state smoking rate to fall by one percentage point more compared to states without a ban. Still, Massachusetts law enforcement...

More WA residents to be eligible for vaccines March 31, eviction moratorium extended Washington residents in tiers 3 and 4 of phase 1b of the state’s COVID-19 vaccine plan will be eligible March 31. Also, the statewide moratorium on evictions extended. BY TVW As of last week, thousands of smokers of all ages, whether current or former, are automatically eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations in our state. No proof of purchase or breath test required. No evidence that you’ve puffed at least 100 cigarettes in your lifetime, the US Centers for Disease Control’s rather random threshold for whether someone is or...

In the 1950's scientists Richard Doll and Bradford Hill published a study from the UK finding that the risk of lung cancer was related to the number of cigarettes smoked per day, and this risk was 25 times higher in those who smoked more than 25 cigarettes per day. Other scientists, namely Ernest Wynder and Evarts Graham, found a strong association between bronchogenic carcinoma and smoking. 96.5% of men with bronchogenic carcinoma were heavy chain smokers compared to 73.7% of the general population. Several extensive studies within one year of each other found the same thing, cigarette smoking is strongly...

(CNN)"The legislature finds that the cigarette is considered the deadliest artifact in human history." So begins the text of a new bill introduced in Hawaii's State House, calling for a phased ban on cigarette sales in the state by 2024. Hawaii has some of the most restrictive cigarette laws in the nation. In 2016, it became the first state to raise the age to buy cigarettes to 21. Now, its new bill calls for raising the cigarette-buying age to 30 by next year, up to 40, 50 and 60 in each subsequent year, and up to 100 by 2024. That...

This column has already documented officialdom’s unrelenting war on e-cigarettes. In fact, those articles were some of the best-read I have ever posted, so I guess we touched a nerve. The insidious tag team—comprised of Big Tobacco and the supposed public health interest groups against smoking—is perfectly evocative of the “Bootleggers and Baptists” phenomenon, originally described by economist Bruce Yandle. This latest attack comes in the form of certain Indiana laws, passed this year. Specifically, we refer to Indiana House Enrolled Act 1432 (regulates e-liquids); and Indiana Senate Enrolled Act 463 (regulates the sales of e-cigarettes, treating them as tobacco...

You may like technology (who doesn't these days) or the energy sector (where would we be without it) -- but if you're making a long-term bet as an investor, there's a lot going for Big Tobacco. It's not just that tobacco boasts the best historical performance of all U.S. industries. The industry's future seems especially bright. As marijuana gradually becomes a legal drug, Big Tobacco is poised to dominate the market.

Tobacco industry once had high hopes for marijuana business USA -- Richard Nixon was in the White House, his "war on drugs" was in full swing, yet Big Tobacco was secretly exploring the possibility of becoming Big Pot. Newly discovered documents from tobacco company archives at UC San Francisco show that major companies in the cigarette industry investigated joining the marijuana business in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The companies were driven then by the same shift in public attitudes that is now pushing legalization around the country. One company even asked a federal counter-narcotics official to secretly secure...

President and Moo Obama Announce New Crusade. Moo took the lead at the press conference in announcing their new crusade "Toking is not Smoking". His Arrogance and Moo will take their program to the schools during the month of February. Many children are erroneously reporting their parents as smoking under the "Comrades Reporting Addiction Program (CRAP)" under CORE when they are just toking a few joints after work. Several leaders of cancer charities, the Surgeon General, CDC and HHS have joined with His Arrogance and Moo to clarify that doing a few doobies is not the same as the filthy...

(CNSNews.com) - "We're still a country very much addicted to tobacco," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a news conference last Friday, as she urged communities, schools and businesses to "help make the next generation a tobacco-free generation." A transcript of that news conference runs around 8,300 words, but there isn't a single word about the adverse health effects of marijuana smoking -- even as more states jump on the pot-legalization bandwagon. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, marijuana smoke is an irritant to the lungs, and "frequent marijuana smokers can have many of the same...

Packs of ten cigarettes could be banned under a European proposal to crack down on smoking. The EU’s Health and Consumer Commissioner also unveiled plans to ban menthol cigarettes and to force companies to cover three quarters of their packs with a picture warning. The idea is to make smoking less attractive to children, who are more likely to buy smaller packs of cigarettes with their pocket money. Youngsters are also more likely to buy flavored cigarettes such as menthol and strawberry. … The EU wants the new rules to come into force across the continent by 2016. Under the...

A doctor in a white lab coat stands at the pearly gates. The voice of God booms, “And your good deeds?” The man responds, “Well, as a dermatologist, I’ve been warning people that sunlight will kill them and that it is as deadly as smoking.” His smug smile fades as God snaps, “You’re saying that sunlight, which I created to keep you alive, give you vitamin D and make you feel good, is deadly? And the millions of dollars you received from chemical sunscreen companies had nothing do with your blasphemy?” A bottle of SPF 1000 sunscreen materializes in the...

PRINCETON, N.J. — The number of Americans who smoke has fallen to 20 percent, tying the all-time low first recorded in 2009, according to a new poll by Gallup. The decline is sharpest among young adults, a signal the overall rate may continue to fall after years of plateauing. "This is all very good news," said Randall Burt, professor of medicine at the University of Utah and senior director of prevention and outreach and clinical services at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. "Ultimately, less smoking will result in fewer cancer deaths, as well as a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and...

Don Barrett, a Mississippi lawyer, took in hundreds of millions of dollars a decade ago after suing Big Tobacco and winning record settlements from R. J. Reynolds, Philip Morris and other cigarette makers. So did Walter Umphrey, Dewitt M. Lovelace and Stuart and Carol Nelkin. Ever since, the lawyers have been searching for big paydays in business, scoring more modest wins against car companies, drug makers, brokerage firms and insurers. Now, they have found the next target: food manufacturers. More than a dozen lawyers who took on the tobacco companies have filed 25 cases against industry players like ConAgra Foods,...

Not content with masterminding Obamacare, which taxes, regulates, and disincentivizes the healthcare industry into nothing more than a capitulatory utility under government control, Democrat Senator Max Baucus used the recently passed transportation bill as the vehicle to exterminate thousands of jobs with the stroke of Barack Obama’s pen. In addition to the $400 million the senator earmarked for his state’s highway system, the Montana senator mischievously added a separate and unrelated special interest earmark to the transportation bill as a nod to his Big Tobacco benefactors at Altria, a parent company of tobacco giant Philip Morris. How did he appease...

Nobody mentioned tobacco last week when the U.S. Senate adopted an amendment to the $109 billion federal highway bill. But tucked into the 5,600-word amendment to provide aid for rural schools was a single paragraph that would settle a two-year-old fight between Big Tobacco and a small Ohio company that builds a do-it-yourself machine that allows smokers to get their cigarettes a lot cheaper. The amendment would reclassify tobacco shops that offer the machines as “tobacco manufacturers,” imposing on them new regulations and higher taxes, and it opens a window into the ways of Washington, where the powerful and the...

A Massachusetts jury today ordered cigarette manufacturer Lorillard Inc. to pay $71 million in damages to a dead smoker's family for allegedly seducing the Boston woman decades ago into smoking Newport cigarettes. The Suffolk Superior Court jury awarded compensatory damages of $50 million to the estate of Marie Evans and $21 million to her son, William Evans. A hearing on punitive damages in the lawsuit has been scheduled for Thursday. The total amount of damages awarded could rise significantly at that hearing. The case was the first to claim that Lorillard had decided to target minority communities with samples of...

The authors of these research papers have been personally attacked by name and by innuendo, being called "deniers" and so forth. This is how The Universe of Lies operates. This is the left. Wherever you find it, Marxists, socialists, communists, liberals, progressives, this is how they do everything. I want you to think about something, ladies and gentlemen, as we go to the break. Let's take a walk down Tobacco Road, shall we? Another teachable moment. You remember Big Tobacco, don't you? What was it about Big Tobacco that got Big Tobacco in so much trouble with the leftists? Didn't...

OAKLAND — Former state Senate President Pro Tem and 2010 Oakland mayoral candidate Don Perata joined cancer research and health advocates Monday to launch a ballot measure that would hike cigarette taxes by a dollar a pack. "This is the right measure for the right time," Corey Goodman, a UC San Francisco professor and former biotech entrepreneur, said at a news conference in the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, adding the half-billion dollars per year this measure could raise would help move scientific breakthroughs "from the bench to the bedside" to save lives. Perata said he conceived of the measure...

Only two months after smoking areas were erected at two hospitals, the desire to go smoke-free on the premises will eliminate the smoking rooms entirely and replace them with smoking shelters. NHS Lothian (Scottland) will eliminate smoking rooms at Royal Edinburgh as well as at Astley Ainslie. The will then provide smoking shelters in it's phased shut down of the indoor smoking areas. The Health Board claims the action will assist smokers in quitting. The Health Board states, "These shelters will act as a platform to promote our stop smoking services, to encourage people to seek help to give up...