Imagine this. You started smoking at the age of 16-17 years old. You enlist in the military at age 18. You go to into a combat zone (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan) at the age of 19 and the new age limit on smoking has just been passed. You are overseas and just came back from your first patrol outside of “the wire”. You see your fellow soldiers 21+ smoking a cigarette, and realize, by law, you are not allowed to purchase them. Now that is not to say your fellow soldiers won’t give you one, but the fact that you can be put into a situation by contract where you could die, get wounded, or know somebody that dies or gets wounded, and yet your government says it has the right to tell you, that you cannot light up a cigarette. As a current U.S. solider this does not sit right with me.  

 The majority of young adults that are dying from “vapes” are dying from black market thc pods not sold regularly in stores. Instead of screwing everybody over, the government could do a better job regulating distributors of nicotine products, because nicotine is not the killer.

 Another point is, the constitution gives us the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And if going to the gas station and buying a pack of Marlboro reds and packing them on a palm, and lighting it up on the way home makes a young man or woman happy (at least 18) then what gives the government the right to tell them they cannot. The government does not get to tell its citizens how to think and what choices to make. That’s what sets The United States apart from others. Once we start doing this it will create a ripple affect and our government is going to be making every decision for us, and turn us into a new and improved Soviet Union. 

 Please lawmakers, listen to these points and the thousands of other people that just want the right to choose what they can do with their body and health, back in their own hands.