“There needs to be a place where elderly white men can still enjoy a good cigar” declared Colorado Senator Tom Sullivan on the record in response to witness testimony by the American Heart and Lung Associations against the cigar exemption amendment in the wine walks bill CO HB24-1156. Mounds of evidence against the amendment were presented but all it took to override all that evidence was the declaration of an elderly white male lawmaker of his sacred colonial entitlements. His colleagues on the dais even giggled and nodded as he spoke, passing the amendment — and the bill — unanimously.

CO HB24-1156 is only one among ALL of the alcohol bills I tracked this past legislative session. I generated individual reports on each of them culminating in a 160-page collection, which I sent to Governor Polis and to members of the Senate Ethics Committee early July. As of the date of this post, I’ve not heard from any of them, but I’d also sent the collection to the Colorado Domestic Violence Fatality Review Board because I’d referenced their data throughout the legislative session, and they did reach out to me and I had a very enlightening and amazing meeting with a representative from that Review Board.

I’d recently finished reading the book Caste: Origins Of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson when the session began so it was almost too easy to see the overwhelming evidence that we have a caste system of substance use baked into our laws and criminal justice system — and that it is alive, well, and functioning as its framers intended.

Lawmakers even slipped this elite cigar festival exemption into the ruling caste alcohol wine walks bill HB24-1156, the focus of this post, for added protection.

“There needs to be a place where elderly white men can still enjoy a good cigar” declared Colorado Senator Tom Sullivan.

Of all the alcohol bills tracked this session, this one, HB24-1156 is the most ironic and amusing to me, so am posting that report here. For all the talk of evidence-based this and data-based that, all it took to override all that evidence and data was the declaration of an elderly white male lawmaker about his entitlements. Yikes!

Here is PDF of my report for those interested. Again, this one is the most ironic and amusing to me.

It was fascinating tracking an entire category of bills. We invest in what we value.

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Krystyn Hartman is a graduate student in the Masters of Public Policy program at the University of Colorado.