Tim Walz has legalized recreational marijuana use in his state as well as signed off on dubiously named “harm reduction” programs that provide clean, taxpayer-funded syringes to drug addicts while implementing a staggering 95% tax on Zyn nicotine pouches.
A 95% tax on any good is profoundly un-American, and this tax on Zyn is no exception.
This is further evidence that despite consistent, repeated attempts by the mainstream media to paint the Minnesota governor and vice presidential hopeful as a salt of the earth, average Joe, “guy's guy” midwesterner, he's anything but, and has a long history of pushing policies that are hostile to the very people he claims to represent.
The Daily Caller reports:
Use of adult smokeless tobacco, which includes Zyn nicotine pouches, skew heavily towards midwestern, low-income men living in rural areas, according to data from the CDC and the UK's National Institute of Health (NIH).
The nicotine pouches have also been popularized by personalities like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson.
In January of this year, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York called for a federal crackdown on the pouches, urging both the Federal Trade Commission and Food and Drug Administration to investigate the company.
Walz has implemented sky high fines for Zyn, and attempted to do the same with vapes, but has expressed openness to legalizing much harder drugs, with much higher potential to have severe and negative impacts on the public.
Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville called out the hypocrisy in the left's war on Zyn:
“Democrats would rather exert more government authority over Americans instead of addressing the surge of deadly drugs pouring into our country.”
The Daily Caller references what happened in both Oregon and Switzerland, following massive decriminalization campaigns.
After Oregon became the first state to decriminalize possession of all drugs in 2020, the state's Democratic Governor Tina Kotek reversed course, signing a bill that re-criminalized the possession of hard drugs in April 2024.
Citizens who voted yes on the bill to decriminalize drugs quickly changed their mind. In 2020, 58.46 percent of voters supported Oregon's Measure 110, a referendum bill which made the maximum penalty for possession of drugs for personal use $100. But in 2023, 56 percent of voters believed it should be repealed as the state's largest city, Portland, saw a surge in overdoses. The number of people who died of overdoses jumped from 610 in 2019 to nearly 1200 in 2022, according to KOIN 6 News.
Califano referenced Switzerland's “needle park,” a government initiative meant to restrict heroin users to a small area. The project “turned into a grotesque tourist attraction of 20,000 addicts and had to be closed before it infected the entire city of Zurich.”
It seems that Walz's targeting of Zyn has nothing to do with public safety or even individual health, because if it did, he wouldn't be following the same paths as Oregon and Switzerland, making it easier for his residents to use deadly narcotics, but that's exactly what he's doing.
