Smoking in Europe Is No Longer Cool
Once upon a time in the Good Old Days, "Europe" was a sophisticated land across the sea full of jazz musicians and sexually adventurous women, and all of them were smoking cigarettes sexily like there was no tomorrow. Those days are dead now. Europe is on its way to becoming just another sanitized smokeless place that sells chocolates.
Yesterday, the "European Parliament," which sounds, ironically, like a brand of cigarettes, but I'll take the WSJ's word that it's actually some sort of lawmaking body, voted to ban "menthol and other flavored cigarettes" throughout the entire European Union. A place that is full of hash! They're also planning to ban "slim" cigarettes, because the packaging is "designed by cigarette makers to look like lipstick or perfume in an effort to appeal to younger women."
Ladies: play it safe and don't smoke your lipstick or perfume, whether or not you believe it to contain cigarettes.
The EU is also going to cover the vast majority of cigarette packaging with strident warnings, and require e-cigarettes to be "to be regulated like medicines." (Just like weed in America!)
All of this is objectively good public health policy that will likely save many thousands of lives. But it's not cool. The whole "die young and leave a pretty corpse" thing gets harder for each successive generation. Sad.
