I'd like to thank the makers of Henry's Hard Soda for joining in with all the others who market alcohol and nicotine to children.
Thanks to their efforts to make such addictive poisons sweet flavored and thus appealing to the under 21 crowd, they are insuring that 20 years later I'll have new applicants seeking out our Liahona Home so they can dry out! Yay!
But the makers of Henry's are only joining a long line of illustrious child poisoners. We do not wish in our praise of them to be accused of overlooking those who came up with the E-cigg with it's bubble gum flavor and cream soda flavor! Oh, I know they say that those are marketed for a "college age" demographic, but *winkie winkie* and *nudgie wudgie*, we know they have to say that, right? Or am I alone in not knowing too many over 21 who get excited about bubble gum and cream soda?
Here's the real deal, since obviously I've been indulging in sarcasm! If a person doesn't start smoking by 21, odds are he/she never will. Tobacco companies know this, and when they tried to flavor regular cigarettes awhile back, they were shut down fast on that. But with this cute little marketing ploy of the supposedly safe "e-cigg", they can flavor the "vape" anything they like. Just like they still do with blueberry and grape and cherry cigarillos. And rather than stick with adult flavors, they dove straight down to "sweet", which appeals primarily to children. Yes, some adults can enjoy it, no doubt, but it appeals to kids most of all.
Vaping is marketed as supposedly for "quitting", but it really introduces kids to smoking. Vaping lets kids vape in school bathrooms with no tell tale cloud of smoke, no smoke smell on their clothes, and for them personally, no ugly non-sweet taste to turn them off of it.
And these alcohol companies are doing the same thing, marketing in a fashion to appeal to children by adding the alcohol straight to actual children's drinks! Thus it's not enough to sell vodka, now it is pre-flavored with every Kiddy Kool-aid kind of flavor you can imagine. I know most of you reading this aren't alkies or big into the drinking scene, but trust me, when you're an adult drinker, you aren't seeking out too much "grape", "cherry" or "chocolate" flavored drinks!
Enough should be enough. Vaping needs outlawed, period. It's too obvoiusly specifically designed to be a surreptitious way for kids to get hooked on nicotine without anyone noticing till it's too late. All "flavored" cigarillos need outlawing, at once Cigarettes - and all forms of tobacco - need to be illegal until a person is 21. With some serious teeth in the law both for the seller and the buyer. Since all those responsible cigarette companies "only" want adults to smoke, I'm sure they won't mind, will they? Uh huh.
And as for these alcohol companies, I fully realize that they'll duck behind five hundred exceptions such that no law could sufficiently make what they're doing a crime while still permitting the usual flavors of tradition. But we can certainly have our courts be directed to permit the free flow of a variety of civil suits, so that much like those who sued over Joe Camel in the nineties, we can have some lawsuits over Mike's Hard Lemonade, Henry's Hard Soda and whatever kiddie-flavored rum of the week is being advertised by a friendly pirate winking when he says to "drink responsibly"! I also take strong exception to the Lie in Advertising of Henry's telling kids that the drinks are only "hard-ish". Well, the alcohol content is 4.2%, and while that is not as strong as a Steel Reserve, it's stronger than a Bud Ice Lite at 4.1%! Making it "harder" than some beer, not "hardish"!
We have learned by sad experience and by scientific study, that the short cuts to pleasure represented by alcohol and by cigarettes can then lead to seeking pleasure short cuts from marijuana, then from other drugs. It leads to seeking after all manner of short cuts to pleasure instead of learning to have pleasure in appropriate and non-damaging ways. If a child can be deterred or disuaded from trying any of these until after his/her brain is fully formed, they are then unlikely to seek out such poisonous "short cut" pleasures when they have already learned how to enjoy life truly and naturally.
Thus those that seek to have new customers must scoot in before the child is fully mature and derail him/her before they reach that safe age! Such companies need to be named and shamed, and need to be outlawed and/or sued into oblivion. Or you'll just be guaranteeing more sad "business" for more sober living homes in the future.
