Proposed Federal Vaping Ban Is Bigger Than Vaping

By John Michaels

The Trump administration is aggressively pushing an unconstitutional ban on all flavored vape products after reports that over 1,000 people have become ill and roughly two-dozen people have died, supposedly from “vaping.”

Vaping has been called an “epidemic” even though vaping has been around for over 10 years with no prior reports of anything like this ever happening. In contrast, if we examine the number of lung cancer deaths from smoking cigarettes between 2005 and 2010 we see that over 130,000 people have died from this life choice.

Alex Azar, the head of the unconstitutional Department of Health and Human Services was quoted as saying:

We will not stand idly by as these products become an on-ramp to combustible cigarettes or nicotine addiction for a generation of youth.

It seems the Trump White House is taking the moral stance of “saving the children” when attacking the vape issue. An article in the New York Times stated:

The White House and the F.D.A. have faced mounting pressure from lawmakers, public health officials, parents and educators, who have grown alarmed by the popularity of vaping among teenagers but have felt powerless to keep e-cigarettes away from students and out of schools.

The federal government’s reasoning is that flavored vape juice is specifically targeting the youth; therefore, a ban of all flavored vape products will help solve this issue.

In fact, vape juice is basically the same substance used in theatrical fog and haze machines at concerts, plays, and night clubs. People have been breathing it in since the ’70s without an epidemic of deaths. All of the arguments presented by the HSS and CDC fail when logic is applied.

But there is a more fundamental issue. The federal government doesn’t have the power to ban vape juice. If you doubt this, ask yourself why it required a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol.

The point is vaping is a life-choice. When you form a government with specific, limited powers and then unconstitutionally use that government to limit people’s choices, you are setting people up to be criminals based on nothing more than their curiosity to be free. It’s a dangerous precedent. Once you consent to them regulating your own choices as a free human being, it opens the door to ultimate tyranny. We’ve seen how the federal government gives usurped power back…wait, we haven’t because they never give it back.

You see, this vaping ban isn’t really about vaping, or public health, or even saving the children. This is about taking baby-steps toward controlling the personal choices of the entire populace. The government starts with hot-button issues like guns, drugs, and now vape juice — any issue in which the populace is split between freedom and safety. The feds step in and rally a moral cause to usurp the right of the people to make a free choice and then they never give it back.

This is precisely why the framers created a federal government with limited powers. They understood that without strict limits, government would grow and grow.

Tenth Amendment clearly states:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

There is no rare interpretation of this amendment as MSNBC claims. This amendment is one of the most CLEARLY laid out limits on power.

All just forms of government come from the CONSENT of the governed (as was stated in the Declaration of Independence.) The Tenth Amendment is in plain English, virtually unencumbered by the 18th-century legalese that creates confusion about other constitutional provisions. It says that any right not specifically delegated to the federal government (which is encapsulated primarily by article 1 section 8) remains the right of the several states, or to the people (meaning the people of the several states as they are giving their consent to government.)

People are left to make decisions about things like vaping in their own communities. The federal government has no say.

Humans are curious, and most of the time when you tell someone they cannot eat, drink, wear, or know something, it only drives their curiosity to do that thing. Think of a world where that freedom of personal exploration and your basic human freedom of making a personal choice is taken from you little by little. After a long while your freedom is only given at the behest of your government. If you can’t imagine a situation like that, then just take a look around. We are living in one.

This article was sourced from The Tenth Amendment Center