FDA Moves to Regulate Cigars

from The PJ Tatler by Bryan Preston:

 

 

FDA Moves to Regulate Cigars:

Lawmakers worry that the new rules could hurt small businesses and interfere with cigar smokers’ enjoyment of their hobby. Though the agency has yet to lay out its new regulations in detail, industry insiders speculate that it could ban flavored cigars, require ugly warning labels or graphic pictures on cigar boxes, bar customers from entering store humidors, or require that cigars be kept out of the reach of potential buyers, who typically handle and examine them before choosing which ones to buy.

“Banning that experience would be crippling,” says Gary Pesh, the owner of Old Virginia Tobacco in Richmond, Virginia, and executive officer of Cigar Rights of America. “Making a customer pick their brand of cigars from a black-and-white catalog — that destroys the way we’ve done business.”

Pesh says some speculate that the FDA would also bar shops from letting their products be visible to anyone outside the store.“That means I’d have to put blacked-out windows on my storefront,” he explains. “Like a porn shop or something.”

There was a time when lawmakers wrote the laws we would be subjected to, now like us they worry about the implications of new laws, or regulations as if there were a difference, that they too are subjected to.

We are losing our representative democracy to bureaucracy.