I remember my mom wouldn't let me buy Big League Chew. It tore me up. With all of the crackdowns on tobacco advertising aimed at children, it's surprising that something so obvious as this would have slipped through. It would be interesting to see who makes those candies.

Wow ... I NEVER realized that Big League Chew was supposed to be like chewing tobacco. I loved that stuff. I must have been pretty young not to connect the dots, because I was in fact exposed to baseball and imagine I was familiar with the on-camera spitting one sees.

Pop eyes make me car sick.

I'm from Canada, and growing up, I bought Popeye candy cigarettes all the time. They were candy sticks with a red tip that was supposed to represent the burning part of the cigarette. All my friends and I used to pretend to smoke. We thought it was soooo cool. They're still available today, but because of the ban, they're now called Popeye candy sticks, and the red tip is gone. Didn't affect me: I've never smoked.

The chocolate 'cigarettes' make an excellent complement to an espresso or cappuccino. I keep them in the fridge for that reason alone.

And the packaging is always a conversation starter.

I'm pretty sure I saw all three of these products up for sale in Canada in the past few years. I even bought an pack of the "Victory Candy" pictured in the first photo (being an Orwell fan, how could I not?) in Halifax not long ago.

I'm curious as to what constitutes "packaging that resembles real cigarettes" in the eye of the government. Given the look of canadian cigarette packs these days (they look like this: http://tinyurl.com/3yhxhgl ), I wonder if they consider the first photo as packaging that "looks" like cigarette packaging, since it does not look at all like what is sold over here.

A lot of people confuse the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act as banning candy cigarettes. That bans any flavorings aside from menthol in tobacco in the US. I frankly think that was all kinds of stupid, as their predominant reasoning was the good flavors appealed to kids. Every flavored cigarette I've tried tasted like cough medicine and ass, but maybe I just got terrible ones.

I loved candy cigarettes and Big League Chew, and I knew exactly what they were emulating. I never smoked.

I also think that banning flavored cigarettes (and cloves!) was all kinds of stupid. The problem isn't tobacco, really. The problem is cigarette manufacturers doing their best to lie about the harm their products can cause, and with doing their best to make their product even more addictive. I'd be happy enough on a ban, if people were allowed to grow their own, and sell it in limited quantities.

(yeah yeah yeah I know, second hand smoke kills. But so does car exhaust and no one is banning the automobile.

I just think it's hilarious that one of the flavors is "El Bubble" with a picture of a stereotypical native american...what does it even mean??

Also, like other commenters, I didn't realize as a kid that Big League Chew was supposed to be chewing tobacco because I ate it when I was so young.

I had a candy cigar and a candy cigarette when I was a kid. There's no way I'd smoke though. Everyone in my family who does dies in their 50s or 60s of smoking-related causes, while everyone else lives into their 90s.

I would not want my kid to buy these candies that resemble tobacco products, however, I would let my child buy a bubble gum joint and loose leaf "Mary Jane" candy because I could use them as fun prompts to teach decriminalization. I could also buy some "Candy Rocks" with a "Rock Pipe" in which resembles methamphetamine or crack cocaine so I can teach my kids about labeling theory and the hypocrisy of a war on drugs. My children can truly understand those people desperately calling out for help as they emulate those that use the real drugs. Come to think of it, I could also pretend my children have throat cancer (from years of cigarette use)and are in the hospital in need of their next legal morphine tablet (candy version) to stay alive for another day. This would be hours of interactive family fun.

There are some Australian equivalents fr these. The first is Big Boss, which used to resemble cigars (I can't find the original packaging, it was the mafia guy smoking a cigar). Now they're marketed as "dynamite sticks", and come in a variety of colours and flavours. 

The second is fads. They used to be called fags, and were white with a red tip. Now they're marketed as "fun sticks", and are plain white (or yellow). The box is still the same general shape as a cigarette box, though, and kids still pretend to smoke them.

I remember eating chocolate cigarettes... and I also remember holding them the wrong way round, with the filter end of the packaging furthest away from me, when a friend and I pretended to be smoking to freak random adults out ("ya idiot- they're looking at us, but its probably because you're holding it the wrong way round!").

I don't smoke... I'm not sure about the friend above, though I've never seen her smoking and she still lives next door to me. Her father smokes though. I would say parental smoking impacts children far more than these products: another friend, who certainly does smoke, was brought up by two parents who smoked, and let him have cigarettes illegally aged about 13 and up.

I remember getting a "pack" of the cigarette candy. They came with a fine dusting of powdered sugar between the candy and a paper wrapper and the tip of the candy was red. If you held the candy in your mouth like a cigarette and blew, the powder would blow out and look like smoke.

I remember having them on the school bus, going back to school from a trip of the Aquarium of the Pacific.

I ate those all the time as a kid. My favorites where the ones that tasted just like the white hearts in Sweethearts candy or Necco wafers. They were just white sticks with a pink dot on one end. If you pretended to smoke them for too long, the candy started dissolving on your lips, which discouraged it.

My dad did smoke off and on, and I have as an adult, but I hardly blame the candy. At the same time, I'm also still surprised that that kind of thing is legal!

Oh man. Memories. We used to get a gang of kids together to walk to the mini-mart and buy tons of candy, and the candy cigarettes were ten cents a box--this was in the late 1980's. We lived on a Navy base, and the mini-mart was only for people with valid military ID. Well, dependents can't get an ID until they're ten years old, so we always had to find a kid who was ten to come with us to the mini-mart.

Oh I would be so sad if big league chew and candy cigarettes were banned. I LOVE both of those! I always thought BLC's relationship to baseball was it being marketed as an alternative to chewing tobacco for players.

I loved Big League Chew as a kid. We did have gum cigarettes. They were tasty and wrong. I never took up smoking, though. Never appealed.

Big League Chew was made by Wrigley gum (now Ford Gum owns it) and the candy cigs shown are made by Necco. They are candy made by candy companies. Maybe we need a study to ask people if they ate these and later became smokers. What you are doing here is assuming that it is true that eating candy smokes leads to smoking without any evidence. Knee jerk reactionary assumptions are being made without evidence, face validity only takes you so far.

BTW, Big League was thought up by an outfielder as an alternative to the pouch.

Probably evidence of the kind of upbringing I had, but my siblings and I used to buy these from the corner candy store for 50 cents and pretend we were stereotypical "white trash"-- barefoot, pregnant, yelling at each other. That was really the only exposure we had had to cigarettes-- our classmates' parents and our neighbors in the rural, poor area we lived in when we were very young. I remember my mom getting mad at us and taking them away, though I don't remember if it was because they were cigarettes or because we were being little assholes.

Anyway, to this day I still associate cigarette smoking as a lower-class, minimal education thing, and have to check myself because I constantly see people who smoke and make assumptions about their education level (I know this is privileged, but it was reinforced a lot through my childhood and is hard to overcome). It really confused a 16year old girl I worked with once, because she associated them with coolness and sophistication and I associated them with poverty and poor life choices, and our assumptions would clash at times-- and it frustrated her that my assumptions were right more often than hers.

I know a kid who got high sniffing pixie sticks. Also, If you eat pop rocks and drink coke you can die.
Candy cigarettes were only cool if it was cold enough that you could see your breath so you could really freak adults driving by out while waiting for the bus in the morning. I wish they still made bubble beepers those were really cool. There was a chain of steak houses in Miami that had "kids beer" aka birch beer on the menu and a lengthy kiddie cocktail menu when I was a kid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIAC3hM2aus

Smokin' Smarties aint new kiddo.

I find it amusing they're still making the exact same gum cigars from when I was a kid (seems they gave up on the orange tiger ones, though).

Buying bubble gum cigars at the hospital gift shop was my brother and my favorite part of going to work with our parents. They were intended to celebrate new babies (pink for girls and blue for boys). We definitely pretended to smoke them but mainly we were excited to buy such a large quantity of gum.

The 3-ish people I know of who buy candy/toy cigarettes/cigars are adults who have played characters with smoking addictions in Live-Action Roleplaying Games. Marketing them as candy for kids is kind of weird, though.

I liked chocolate cigarettes as a kid, but hate tobacco.

I don't think it's that big a deal... It seems now folks are getting torn up over the slitest things and making everything controversial... Me personally, I love big league chew