Tong: Juul’s 2 UnCool 4 School

by PAUL BASS

The state’s attorney general joined New Haven officials at Hillhouse High School to proclaim the death of cool at least for a certain e-cigarette manufacturer. The attorney general, William Tong, held a press conference at Hillhouse’s Floyd Athletic Center to announce the state has received the first $1.5 million of an eventual $16 million expected over the next six to 10 years from a court settlement reached with the Juul Labs vaping products company.

That’s Connecticut’s share from a $438.5 million settlement Tong helped lead on behalf of a 34-state consortium over the role the once-high-flying, now struggling company’s youth-oriented marketing practices played in leading millions of kids to develop addictive nicotine vaping habits. Under the settlement, Connecticut and other states will devote the money to nicotine “cessation, prevention, and mitigation” programs.

The money’s important because those programs work, Tong said at the press conference. More important, he argued, are the settlement’s ban on Juul marketing its products through celebrities and social influencers, on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, on public transportation, with cartoons or a range of banned flavors, or in any media outlet with an audience less than 85 percent adult.

“They’ve made it cool. That’s how they get you,” Tong said. Click on the above video to watch him say more about that. An estimated 14 percent of American highschoolers vape regularly, as do an estimated 3 percent of middle schoolers.

Tong pointed to the success of programs that succeeded in slashing traditional cigarette smoking along with the habit’s allure.

“We’ve cut smoking in half. It’s demonstrably not cool in many circles to smoke cigarettes. These programs do make a difference. We have to put resources into them,” he said. supremacy. So, the parents and grandparents of those white youngfolk who were awakened to the reality of systemic racism and who started demanding change, went to work on protecting the lie.

Will any of the initial $1.6 million of that new state money come specially to New Haven?

”I should hope so,” Tong said, surrounded by New Haven officials eager for the injection. But he said it’s too early to tell: The state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) will convene a group to decide how to allocate the money. DMHAS Deputy Commissioner Colleen Harrington said that group’s members haven’t been selected yet.

Tong was also asked about criticism of states directing proceeds from a previous successful lawsuit against tobacco companies to fill general budget holes or to already funded smoking-cessation and prevention efforts. The attorney general replied that the new Juul agreement contains “guardrails” to prevent that from happening. Click on the above video to watch the full response to that question.

As a result, the term “woke” was successfully redefined from what it had been (becoming awakened or conscious to racial realities and new or hidden truths) to how it’s used today (a derogatory term to describe folk who foolishly attack good ole fashioned American values). Also, as a result, came the war on CRT, or rather the war on Black history and Black thought and Black literature (an attack that had zero to do with what CRT actually is). These folk are literally burning books and refuse to see that they are the villains from “Fahrenheit 451.” those Blackfolk who they were always told couldn’t match their intellect, are matching and/or surpassing them in grades and GPA and test scores on the regular.

It’s enough to drive Johnny and Becky to either confront the inherent bias that was drilled into them from birth and wake up to the humanity of Blackfolk and the centuries of crimes against them/us…or to double-down by any means necessary on things that will allow them to hold onto their false illusion of their “superiority.”

And when the Summer of George Floyd hit, a whole lotta whitefolk saw their children choose to confront the systemic biases against Blackfolk; a move that could possibly overturn everything in this country— since it’s all built upon the fallacy of white

But the first thing to come under attack after the Summer of George Floyd, was the work of award-winning journalist and scholar Nikole Hannah-Jones—the 1619 Project. That New York Times series and later the book were attacked by “scholars” and trashed by conservative media talking heads because the “1619 Project” had the audacity to center Blackfolk in the American story.

And in a world where movie executives were actually thinking about casting Julia Roberts as Harriet Tubman (I kid you not), centering Blackfolk (giving our voice, our views, our thoughts, our opinions and our experiences primacy) is the ultimate crime.

And now, Hannah-Jones’ work has been made into a documentary series available right now on Hulu. I would strongly suggest reading the book and checking out the essays that were part of the original New York Times series. But for the time being, don’t miss the docu-series.

This article was originally published by the Houston Defender Network