House Bill 2639
Bob Ramstad
The House hearing will be Tuesday Jan 19 in the House Committee on
Health Care & Wellness at 1:30 PM in House Hearing Rm E of the John L.
O'Brien Building.
If you attend, please try to avoid dressing too weird, and reeking of
pipe smoke. Thanks.
There is a sign in sheet at the front. Make sure to sign in and check
off the box that you support the bill. If you'd like to testify,
that's fine, just take some time to review the materials here
http://www.bobramstad.com/Pipes/5340.html
and here
http://www.bobramstad.com/Pipes/5340SPC.html
for ideas, bring fifteen copies of your testimony so they can be given
to the staff and committee, and assume you will get only 3 minutes or
so to speak. The committee is Health & Wellness so if you have any
anecdotes or information that speaks to this, that's great to
include. If you find that your testimony is partially duplicated,
it's best to say "I agree with the earlier point that..." and move
right along. The legislators really get unhappy when multiple people
get up and say the same thing.
I felt the Senate hearing went fairly well. There were three or four
points made by the opposition which were surprising, but they are IMHO
misleading, incorrect, or just plain untruths.
-- Bob
award
There's no way I can attend any of these hearings, but I have
contacted my legislators twice each.
Alan
Bob Ramstad
Points were basically kids, kids, difficulty of enforcement, kids.
Gotta save the kids, otherwise they'll all end up smokers.
The three things that were misleading, incorrect, or just plain false
were:
* A claim that 30,000 children smoked tobacco in a pipe
* A simple workaround would be for Seattle Pipe Club to get a
tobacconist license
* Roll your own masquerading as pipe tobacco means we can't allow mail
order of pipe tobacco
On the first point, first, it's absurd. Second, I'm sure we're
talking hookah, or mixing broken cigarettes with pot to cut it and
smoking in a glass pipe. We're not talking pipe tobacco in a briar.
On the second, even if we were licensed, we wouldn't be able to mail
tobacco to members, they'd need to be licensed too, so this would be a
ridiculous amount of business and licensing overhead to solve the
problem for maybe, maybe 1/4th of our members.
On the third, the bill would not make mail order of roll your own
tobacco legal, it would just be slightly harder to enforce, which
would automatically get fixed eventually when the Federal government
tightens up the definition of pipe tobacco due to the SCHIP tax
ramifications... this is something that is already getting worked out
and is a technical detail that has pretty much no bearing on us.
It's already been made clear to the Senators on the committee that we
don't believe that these points have any merit. We're focusing right
now on the House hearing, and then will be working on the committees
to get the bills out.
-- Bob