The "YUMMY PRODUCTS PROHIBITED" Approach to Regulating Vice Will Spur Innovations

Menthol Cigarettes, Prohibition's Entrepreneurs and Drinking Rum & Coke

You’ve got to give the federal government credit. Its new effort to curb smoking is innovative and boils down to the following principle: YUMMY PRODUCTS PROHIBITED (YYP)!

Last week the feds announced a coming prohibition on menthol cigarettes. The coming ban on these “cooling” types of cigarettes was not included in the 2009 ban on flavored cigarettes. Why? Because according to surveys, research and polls, 85% of black smokers prefer menthol cigarettes and in 2009 the Congressional Black Caucus didn’t want to piss off their tobacco company campaign contributors.

The Food and Drug Administration, which is proposing the ban, estimates it will result in saving between 92,000 to 238,000 black lives. There is a calculation in here somewhere that assumes a certain amount of black Americans who smoke menthol will not switch to regular cigarettes, but the wide range in that estimate suggests the formula for determining exactly how many will quit rather than switch isn’t really nailed down.

What’s interesting to me, however, is how the anti-alcohol community might learn from the YYP approach to prevention.

I haven’t taken the time to research it, but I don’t think I’d be far off base in suggesting that minors who begin to drink alcohol likely do so by consuming sweetened drinks. For as long as I can remember, there has always been a sweet alcohol for beginner drinkers to use that mitigated what is generally an off-putting character of alcohol on the palates of young folk. In my day it was wine coolers. White Zinfandel played a role for a time. Before all that where was Boone’s Farm. Today, many Ready-To-Drink cocktails, hard seltzers, and other malt or liquor-based drinks serve the purpose.

What if the good people who want us to drink water instead of wine began to push for regulations that banned residual sugar in wine, beer, spirits, and ready-to-drink products? What if all alcohol sold at retail could not contain any residual sugar? You know, for the kids. Surely this would prevent some wide, unknowable range of minors from taking up alcohol consumption.

Admittedly, such a law might encounter some opposition. The powerful Sauterne and Port wine lobbies would be up in arms. On the other hand, there is very little research that shows high schoolers are indulging in sweet Bordeaux or Port wine. But this is likely the case only because they haven’t tasted the stuff. Talk about a gateway drug for minors. Had I known about Sauterne when I was 16 I may have gotten a second after-school job just to support what would surely have become a habit.

Of course, if the dedicated folk that understands wine, beer, and spirits ought to be irradicated were successful in instituting a YPP regulation, it would easily be overcome by budding mixologists. When I was young and even into my early drinking experience, my tipple of choice was a Seven-Seven: Seagram whiskey mixed with 7-Up. Rum and Coke played a similar role for many of my peers.

The coming ban on menthol cigarettes is being touted as part of the Administration’s social justice initiatives; as a way to address inequities facing the black community. It will be interesting to see if the rank and file in the black smoking community sees it that way. It will be further interesting to see how the regulation is responded to by the most innovative smokers. I suspect that underground sales, as well as menthol-creation accessories, will flourish in the wake of the new rule.

One of the most interesting elements of the history of Prohibition is the innovation combined with entrepreneurship by some that went into addressing the ill-conceived ban on alcohol consumption. We tend to think of the era’s bootleggers as lawbreakers. But another way to understand and study them is to see them as innovators. Tell human beings they can’t do what they want to do, put a policing element in place to enforce the ban, and you can be guaranteed there will be a good number of smart people who devise both technical and organizational ways to get around the policy. The bootleggers of the early 20th century were unquestionably entrepreneurs and any history of their activities will show them as innovators too.

It will be fascinating to see how innovators seek to overcome the ban on menthol cigarettes.