If you're going to create a black market via regulation, you better be damn sure the cure isn't worse than the disease. In marijuana's case, that's definitely not true.
The book Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser covers the unintended consequences of black markets in depth and I can't recommend it enough. But pretty much any Schlosser book is great.
The motivations are completely different.
The safety risks of cheaply/poorly made moonshine are well documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonshine#Safety
A decade of no issues like this then suddenly a bunch at the same time the bigs are buying into vaping and the legal market for marijuana is growing. The blue ocean of vaping and marijuana is here, both the black market mafias/cartels and the big fish want it and to shakeout the small/medium suppliers you need an event like this. Not to mention the anti-smoking and cigarette lobbies in with the prohibitionists and presidential and governor executive orders, mere months after Altria buys into Juul (Dec 2018), very sketchy and suspect. Top it off it is a big target of propagandists and bot networks right now. Add all that up and it seems like a planned event after sabotage.
The bigs and the mafias/cartels can weather the storm, the small startups and small/medium businesses that have made safe products for over a decade are the target of attack.
In my opinion it was market sabotage on purpose. Every new blue ocean market has events like this and it is from various sources: big fish, underground mafias/cartels, prohibitionists, authoritarians, puritans and moral patrols.
This is America.
People not thinking it is about market power and money are naive as hell.
You think this is for health reasons? laughable. From the country that can't even get healthcare to everyone?
Same with all bans and prohibitions, makes it more unsafe and more lucrative for mafias/cartels because there is decreased supply and increased demand, price goes up, in comes the underground and big fish and more danger.
What is known to cause cancer is carcinogens and vaping does not combust like cigarettes so that is 20+ less carcinogens going into lungs.
Smoking isn't healthy, but smoking cigarettes is way less healthy and more damaging. Not only for cancer but for heart and circulatory issues. However people smoke all their lives, most of that damage is prevalent at the end.
People should have a Right to Body and there should be safety/health alerts like there are with smoking to let people decide on their own, bans and prohibitions only make the product people will use more dangerous and unsafe, as well as create cartels/mafias that make everyone unsafe.
> The investigation has found that many of these products patients used were bought online or received through friends or family, rather than through vaping shops or at licensed THC dispensaries.
But the official policy was that anyone who got hurt had only themselves to blame.
"By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly."
https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-o...
If an unscrupulous or unknowinh bootlegger sells it anyway this is potentially dangerous.
Doesn't necessarily apply here, but there are things that people believe are such a detriment to society that keeping them around would incur an unacceptable cost to the government and it's people that might outweigh any benefits it brings.