Hawaii, cigarettes

Hawaii just became the first state to raise the legal smoking age to twenty-one.

Said their governor, David Ige,

"Raising the minimum age as part of our comprehensive tobacco control efforts will help reduce tobacco use among our youth and increase the likelihood that our [children] will grow up tobacco-free,"

Always the best intentions. Good luck with this.

The immediate thing that will happen is a brand new class of criminals. Just like that. The magic wand is waved and flash a whole new group of young criminals, along with a new income stream from private citizens to state.

Breaking the new law for the first time would result in a $10 fine. Further violations would cause a $50 fine or community service.

And

This allows us to put one more impediment to people smoking too much.

Impediments, costs, constriction of liberty. Hope it works, for health reasons, especially now that Hawaii state exchange failed, but I doubt it will because, frankly, I've never seen so much drugs as I've seen in Hawaii and I live in Colorado. Beautiful as it is, Hawaii has a very serious drug problem if we must call it such, but only so due to the war on drugs. Imagine yourself living on an island.

It's all good fun the first weeks as you drive around and explore then eventually realize the whole place is rather small.

Alan said, "I'll never forget what you said on the drive to Waimea Bay."

I cast back to the drive out there, placed myself in the car, but only recalled Alan's insistence on stopping for an underwater camera and a sack of frozen peas. None of us cared about any of that. Alan is incredibly annoying sometimes. Turned out he took some extraordinary photos and he sure did know how to get a bunch of colorful blue and yellow-striped fish to gather around him. I didn't say anything important or interesting on that car ride, nothing at all to remember. "What did I say?" Alan said that I told everyone in the van in serious tone that few people know the truth that Waimea Bay was actually discovered by an Italian guy named Gillispie, captain of wooden ship that was torn up on the coral. This being the second ship that Gillispie lost he knew he had fatefully reached the end of his career and would be facing charges soon enough, he fell to his knees in the sand, torn up himself, shredded and bleeding, threw his arms up to God and pleaded, "Why-a me-a? Why-a me-a? Why-a always-a me-a?" A mnemonic device, that's all, one that enabled Alan to come up with the name of the place a decade later. I also recalled thinking that car ride to the opposite side of Oahu from Waikiki, gosh, it's less than forty miles apart.

I asked the woman I worked with at Denver FRB why she left Hawaii after living there so long. She answered, "Rock fever."

It's a thing. There's a word for it.

You're out there on your island pursuing your interests in a largely self-contained world. They are the sweetest people I've met. Their politics and their sweetness do not go together. So easily given to laughter, always up for a game, always ready to sing. I never heard people sing to piped in Christmas music before and laugh at overheard bits as sharing the joke.

Yet not unserious either. For example, I expected their flag to be blue, of course, with a rainbow, and palm tress, a surfer, a unicorn, something like that. Surely a palm tree. But no, their civic sense is serious. Their flag is terribly serious-looking. It's perplexing because it contains the Union Jack within it. I found it puzzling and now that I noticed the flag is seen everywhere, as it must, there are boats everywhere, it is a heavy flag-reading place. All those boat flags mean something, diver in area, personnel working aloft, anchoring mooring weighing, and the like. Finally, one day at breakfast, an open table sort of affair, everybody crowded around tables close by, we asked the four older men at the next table to please explain the Hawaiian flag.

The whole table looked us over top to bottom, scanning us with their eyeballs judging us 100% Haole. How rude! 100% different. 100% foreign. Interloping punks. Smiled broadly, all four did, and the nearest drew closer and carefully explained the reason why British are on their flag. "Hawaiians have an affinity toward Britain. They are important to our history. That is not the British flag in the corner. It's the British flag reversed."

"What? Come'on. British flag can't be reversed. You're putting us on." They all laughed.

"Sure it can. That's how they secretly signaled the boat is in distress, by turning their flag upside down.  You'll notice the thinner diagonal red cross is not centered against white. Viewed as a propeller, it's spinning backwards when hung upside down. The Hawaiian flag is an upside down Union Jack." He explained it relates to nautical story in their history having to do with disease and distress, before involvement with the United States.

"Oh." They could not have been more kind and polite and instructive to a couple of dummkopfs. The whole table really was interested in having us two understand the meaning of their flag. The subject is important to them. The whole episode surprised me.

From what I saw a law like this can have no impact on behavior. The linked article is brief but it managed a few statistics. Meaningless statistics that supported their liberty-snipping action. Maybe this works for island dwellers, I don' know,  but I doubt it. Have you ever seen Dawg, Bounty Hunter?


Related:
Confessions of a pineapple thief.