Governor Swill
2022-12-13 11:46:40 UTC
Adults were selling the shit to children. Put the adults in jail!
WASHINGTON The Supreme Court on Monday refused to block aCalifornia law banning flavored tobacco, clearing the way for
the ban to take effect next week.
As is the courts practice when it rules on emergency
applications, its brief order gave no reasons. There were no
noted dissents.
R.J. Reynolds, the maker of Newport menthol cigarettes, had
asked the justices to intervene before next Wednesday, when the
law is set to go into effect. The company, joined by several
smaller ones, argued that a federal law, the Tobacco Control Act
of 2009, allows states to regulate tobacco products but
prohibits banning them.
They can raise the minimum purchase age, restrict sales to
particular times and locations, and enforce licensing regimes,
lawyers for Reynolds and several smaller companies wrote in an
emergency application. But one thing they cannot do is
completely prohibit the sale of those products for failing to
meet the states or localitys preferred tobacco product
standards.
State officials responded that the federal law was meant to
preserve the longstanding power of state and local authorities
to regulate tobacco products and to ban their sale. Before and
after the enactment of the federal law, they wrote, state and
local authorities have taken action against flavored tobacco and
e-cigarettes.
Whether the federal law displaces the state law turns on the
interpretation of interlocking and overlapping statutory
language in the federal law. The state officials told the
justices that courts have universally rejected the tobacco
industrys arguments that state and local laws restricting or
prohibiting the sale of flavored tobacco products are expressly
pre-empted by that act.
They added: Indeed, in the 13 years since Congress enacted the
2009 law, no court has agreed with the tobacco industry
position that the act pre-empts restrictions and prohibitions on
the sale of flavored tobacco products.
Reynolds also lost on that issue in March in a case concerning a
Los Angeles County ordinance similar to the state law. A divided
three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth
Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled that the 2009 law did not
displace the ordinance. Reynolds has asked the Supreme Court to
hear that case.
A federal judge considering the companys separate challenge to
the state law ruled in November that she was bound by that
precedent and refused to block the law.
The law had been set to go into effect early last year, but it
was suspended while voters considered a referendum challenging
it. The tobacco industry spent tens of millions of dollars in
support of the measure, but 63 percent of the states voters
approved the law in November.
In their Supreme Court brief, state officials urged the justices
not to delay the law any longer. The unsuccessful referendum
campaign has already delayed the implementation of the law for
nearly two years, they wrote, allowing children and teenagers
across the state to be initiated into the deadly habit of
tobacco use via flavored tobacco products throughout that
period.
The plaintiffs told the justices that they face substantial
financial losses from the law, noting that menthol cigarettes
make up about a third of the cigarette market.
Allowing a ban on menthol cigarettes, lawyers for the plaintiffs
wrote, could also cause significant negative consequences for
communities of color, including African Americans. Because
African American smokers in particular disproportionately prefer
menthol cigarettes, Californias ban would disproportionately
harm them, including by exposing them to negative encounters
with law enforcement.
The argument rankled Valerie Yerger, a University of California,
San Francisco, health policy researcher and founding member of
the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council.
When we look at the need to protect African Americans from the
predatory exploitation of the tobacco industry, we need to look
at the fact that a menthol ban will protect them, Ms. Yerger
said. It will not only add years to peoples lives, but it will
increase the quality of their life.
State officials pointed the justices to a letter in April from
the N.A.A.C.P. to the Food and Drug Administration lamenting
what the group called the egregious marketing practices of the
tobacco industry and the fact that African Americans suffer
disproportionately from being addicted to cigarettes and the
effects of long-term tobacco use.
Last week, the Justice Department announced an agreement for
200,000 retailers to display eye-catching signs in their stores
about the dangers of cigarette smoking. The order goes into
effect in July and gives retailers three months to post the
signs. The agreement settles the terms of a 1999 racketeering
lawsuit filed by the U.S. government against tobacco companies,
including Reynolds.
Also last week, a federal court judge in Texas sided with
tobacco companies, blocking an F.D.A. order to place large
graphic warnings about the harms of cigarettes on individual
packages.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/us/supreme-court-flavored-
tobacco-ban-california.html>