Free Republic

President Joe Biden’s administration is delaying its potential plan to ban menthol cigarettes after concerns about the political implications ahead of the 2024 election. The administration planned to announce Friday that it will delay its decision on the rule, people familiar with the matter told the WSJ. While the administration plans to argue that it needs to consult more outside groups on the implications of the rule, there is no current timeline to revisit the issue, the sources told the WSJ. Health and Human Services (HHS) Sec. Xavier Becerra confirmed the news in a statement Friday afternoon, saying the potential...

I’d been reluctant to say this, but now I think it is time…that the ban on smoking is responsible for all this. Been downhill ever since. The rats are out in the open. The good people are in hiding. As at Columbia U, where thousands there and elsewhere are staging an American Kristallnacht. Yes, I know, smoking cigarettes can be hazardous to your health, second-hand smoke included, but back then, before 1995, people had choices. It was live and let live. I smoke a pipe. Can’t write without a pipe, and please spare me the lectures. Sometimes I join the...

“Nobody” should go to jail for “smoking weed,” Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday, despite having prosecuted nearly 2,000 cases of marijuana possession, cultivation, or sale as California’s attorney general. Harris’s public flip-flop is likely due to the politics of a difficult reelection campaign in which the Biden-Harris ticket is losing to former President Donald Trump in 75 percent of 2024 swing states, polling shows. Harris condemned prosecuting those who smoke flowers while speaking at a roundtable event about cannabis reform with musician Fat Joe and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D).

Participants in the I Quit programme, designed to help them quit smoking, need not worry about being fined or prosecuted as it does not presume they have or use vaping products. But if they are caught using or possessing such products, then they will not be immune from criminal prosecution. Senior Minister of State for Health Janil Puthucheary said this on Feb 16 in Parliament when responding to a question from Associate Professor Jamus Lim (Sengkang GRC). Prof Lim had asked whether participants in I Quit, the smoking cessation programme by the Health Promotion Board, were offered immunity from prosecution....

A Chinese marathon runner who chain-smoked his entire way through a 26.2 miles race has been disqualified, despite achieving a competitive time. Uncle Chen, nicknamed the 'Smoking Brother', managed to complete the Xiamen Marathon in three hours and 33 minutes on January 7 this year. But despite crossing the finish line only five minutes slower than his 3:28 finish two years ago, the 52-year-old was disqualified for 'smoking on the track'. He placed 574th out of more than 1,500 runners.

US House Speaker Mike Johnson expecting approval of funding for Ukraine... There's new political polling in Germany that puts the Alternative for Germany at 26 percent of the popular vote... Poland's Conservative President swore in a conservative-nationalist government today even though the liberal-secularists won... A former adviser to the jailed ex-Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan says he was the victim of an acid attack... British politics the latest opinion poll from "Redfield and Wilson" showing the Labor Party at 45 percent, the Conservative Party at 25 percent and the Reform Party at 10 percent... "No choice but to kill...

Two men were caught on camera pummeling an NYPD cop in the head and face at a Bronx subway station Monday after the officer and his partner asked the suspects to put out their cigarettes. Kaream McClary, 23, and Izayiah Jessamy, 20, were charged with assault on a police officer, resisting arrest, and trespassing over the shocking attack at the Freeman Street subway station around 2:30 p.m., police said. The altercation erupted after two officers requested McClary, Jessamy and a third man stop smoking inside the station — but the trio refused, cops said. When the officers tried removing the...

SMOKING will be banished in Britain for youngsters, King Charles confirmed today. At the state opening of Parliament, the monarch confirmed Rishi Sunak will mount an historic crackdown on cigarettes by raising the legal age every year until there are no smokers left. The PM has previously said: "We must tackle the single biggest entirely preventable cause of ill health disability and death. "And that is smoking, and our country. Smoking causes, one in four cancer deaths." The new plans mean a 14-year-old today will never legally be sold a cigarette. The tough new anti-smoking measures would see the smoking...

Scientists have uncovered one way tobacco smoking causes cancer and makes it harder to treat by undermining the body's anti-cancer safeguards. Their study links tobacco smoking to harmful changes in DNA called 'stop-gain mutations' that tell the body to stop making certain proteins before they are fully formed. They found these stop-gain mutations were especially prevalent in genes known as 'tumor-suppressors,' which make proteins that would normally prevent abnormal cells from growing. "Our study showed that smoking is associated with changes to DNA that disrupt the formation of tumor suppressors," says Nina Adler. "Without them, abnormal cells are allowed to...

Researchers found that theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (TBS) can improve self-control, resulting in reduced cigarette cravings and decreased smoking. The study revealed that people with nicotine dependence show different brain structures and functions, with these differences possibly affecting their inhibitory control, making it harder to resist the urge to smoke. Theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment could reduce cigarette cravings. A recent study from the University of Missouri School of Medicine indicates a potential alternative method to address cigarette cravings. The research demonstrates that by using theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (TBS) – powerful and quickly changing magnetic pulses that influence brain...

On a recent weekday afternoon, the high-end flagship’s shoe department smelled less like Manolo Blahnik leather and more like a head shop, a stylist told The Post. “It’s jarring when you walk into a high-end department store where you used to smell Chanel perfume and now it’s weed,” the stylist, who requested anonymity, said. (The Post has reached out to Saks for comment). But, she admitted: “Everywhere you go in New York City smells like weed. It’s not just Saks — it’s at Bloomingdales, at the movies … there’s no high-end anymore.” Indeed, brazen New Yorkers are lighting joints on...

Today I became nostalgic for a smell. You wake up on top of the covers in your underwear, and through the gloaming of your bedroom, through the smug pint of water, through the angst and exhaustion and joy and regret that comes from five hours in a nightclub and two hours on the wrong bus home, there is some bitter relief in the smell of smoke on your hair. That smell! Like barbecued teenagers and pepper and beer, almost lovely, pleasantly vile, a kind of lovebite memory, bruised on the throat in passion. That smell. It all seems quite mad...

German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach is pushing for a ban to prevent smoking in cars where minors and pregnant women are passengers. Smoking in cars is not currently illegal in Germany. The plan, which is part of Lauterbach's draft proposal to legalize cannabis, aims to expand the existing Non-Smokers Protection Act. The expansion of the smoking ban, which already applies in public transport, is intended to "ensure the necessary protection from passive smoking for this particularly vulnerable group of people," according to the draft cited by RND. Smoking in cars has been proven to pose higher risks due to the...

It regularly happens that I’ll strike on the seed of an idea for a column that attempts to connect the current news cycle with an analogous event from history, only to discover that the anniversary of that past milepost falls on or near my deadline. I always take this as a sign from a beneficent universe that I am on solid journalistic footing. And so it was last week as I was reading the section of the 44-page federal indictment of former President Donald J. Trump that dealt with the fateful July 2021 meeting in Bedminster, N.J., between Trump and...

Olczak believes that a move on cigarettes similar to the combustion engine would have to be on a timescale that gives consumers and the industry time to respond and change. ‘Looking at what the UK is doing in the car industry, saying that as of a certain year you are not allowed to produce petrol cars, we could have this with tobacco too,’ he told the Mail. Olczak was himself a smoker for two decades until he tried the brand’s IQOS heated tobacco device, which costs £39 for a starter kit. Products such as heated tobacco and e-vapes now account...

The amount of environmental exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH for short, is strongly linked to a person's risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis, suggests research. These chemicals, formed from the burning of coal, oil, gas, wood, or tobacco as well as the flame grilling of meat and other foods, also seem to account for most of smoking's impact on risk of the disease, the findings indicate. The researchers drew on the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 2007 and 2016. NHANES evaluates a wide variety of toxicants, along with data related to health, nutrition, behaviors and...

A rise in asthma cases has been observed in children from certain racial and ethnic minority groups in states where recreational use of marijuana has been legalized. A recent study conducted by the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and The City University of New York has revealed that there has been a rise in the prevalence of asthma among teenagers in states where recreational use of cannabis has been legalized, as well as among children from certain racial and ethnic minority groups in states with recreational legalization, in comparison to states where it remains fully illegal. The findings...

Black activists are slamming New York governor Kathy Hochul (D.) for moving to ban flavored tobacco products while allowing rampant access to flavored marijuana. "You’re telling me that my 21-year-old son can buy all the cannabis he wants, but my grandmother who’s been smoking for 65 years can’t get a cigarette? It doesn’t make sense," said Corey Pegues, a retired black New York Police Department executive who is urging lawmakers to reject Hochul’s proposal. Pegues said the governor’s proposed legislation, which was tucked in her Jan. 10 State of the State plan, will disproportionately affect black voters. Critics say the...

I Truly Miss Our Tobacco Smoking Culture . The paraphernalia. The rituals. The camaraderie. The cigarettes and cigars and pipes. The rituals. The coffee and cigarettes. The pipe and brandy. The smoky jazz clubs. . It was an age. In retrospect it added texture to our lives.

Dec. 13 (UPI) -- The New Zealand Parliament has approved a measure that raises the age in which people can legally purchase tobacco products as part of an ongoing effort to permanently ban cigarette sales and turn a new generation of young people against smoking. The groundbreaking law, which takes effect on Jan. 1, is thought to be the first time any nation in the world has enacted a measure that would increase the legal age to smoke every year until the entire population phases out. In 2023, tobacco cannot be sold to anyone younger than 14 years old. But...