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Post Office & eLiquid
Yesterday, March 18th, 2014, we received an email from a trusted vendor telling us that their local, rural post office had telephoned them with the terrible news that they (the post office) would no longer pick up and deliver any packages containing eLiquid because of a new regulation they received in a regional Memo. Stunned, the owner of the company contacted Spinfuel eMagazine to see if we had heard anything about a ‘new regulation’ that would kill the industry overnight (my words, not theirs). We informed the owner of the eLiquid company that we would look into it and see if this was the case all over, or just in their neck of the woods.
As it turns out, the rural post office misread, and is still misreading the Memo they received. We are reprinting that memo below.
Why would this happen?
As of now, no one knows. There is nothing in the memo that appears to be a new regulation, and there is certainly nothing in it that would indicate that consumer-level eLiquid would fit any current regulation concerning shipping hazardous materials illegally.
Is the local postmaster so anti-eCigarettes that he or she is looking for any excuse to skirt the current laws and essentially kill a business with a bullet to the head? Is a genuine mistake made by overzealous postal workers looking to avoid trouble? Your guess is as good as mine, but if I were a betting man I would tend to think that someone in that post office is very anti-vaping.
The bigger issue of course is how Americans are changing. Even if this were a genuine mistake, the blind faith in the memo, seemingly written in a way that would cause 2 or 3 people to agree that it was now illegal to pick up and deliver eLiquids that they would act against a well-established business without confirmation from anyone higher up the chain, and essentially shut it down.
Is this an example of how fascism begins to creep into society? Misreading a memo and acting upon the misreading despite the injury it would absolutely cause to an innocent business, without bothering to look deeper, to get to the bottom of it, and to fail to act in a manner that looks most favorably toward the potential victim is the very definition of ‘blind faith’, and the foundation of which all fascism is built. To put it simply, it’s scary as hell.
We invite our readers to chime in and to let us know how you interpret the memo below. If you work for the post office in your town or city, we would love to hear from you with respect to the validity of this memo, and what you would do if this memo crossed your desk.
I know I write often about how corrupt our politicians are, and how society is changing so fast that young people today carry an attitude that speaks to the end days of the freedoms that we’ve fought so long to keep secure.
Young people have the attitude of “as long as I can still go to the mall, I’m fine with whatever you want to do” and it is seeping into the workforce now. This incident from yesterday is a clear example of how following orders, even if those orders are wrong, unclear, or illegal, is just how its done now.
This must stop. We have too easily turned over so much control over our own lives that we will soon (if we haven’t already) lose the strength and the will to do anything about it.
What should happen now?
Whoever made the decision yesterday at this rural post office to refuse to pick up several hundred dollars of legal packages should be fired, and held up as an example of someone that took the law into their own hands and caused injury to an innocent party, not to mention a very good customer to the post office, a business losing billions every year. The Postmaster General needs to know about this. The public needs to know about this. If nothing is done, who’s to say that not too far down the road every post office in the land will be opening every package looking for suspicious materials?
It’s a new world out there, and we’re just letting it happen. How sad is that?
John Manzione
MEMO
