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Setting aside 1 and looking at 2, it seems silly to me to point out that other things (alcohol) that cause problems and are not being restricted. You take the wins where you find them, and the government isn't a magical force that can impose its will on the people arbitrarily. This is obviously the government responding to the general sense of the people (perhaps putting its thumb on the scale). The UK doesn't support cigarettes, so the law gets passed. If someone has a public opinion poll there showing less than 50% support for this, I'd love to see it.
Alcohol is heavily restricted, though. You can't sell it to minors, younger minors can't drink it in public, you can't sell/buy/make it above a certain proof, you can only resell it from authorized distributors, it is taxes, and so on.
Sure, banning cigarettes for a specific generation is a much more stringent restriction, but plenty of other restrictions exist.
One could frame this as a substance regulation for anyone under 18, with the age moving one year every year henceforth.
Banning it today and expecting people to cope, or attempt to fund recovery efforts for a whole nation would completely misunderstand the addicts mind. If you don’t want to quit, you never will.
Instead we have a total ban that is timeboxed to allow the addicts the rest of their lives to quit one way or another.
Cigarettes on the other hand are not so popular. If you ask most smokers if they regret starting about 90% say yes. They mostly want to quit but are addicted. Quite different from booze.
For booze it's much 'worse.' Nearly 80% have ever drunk alcohol but 50% of them still do. A much higher rate of ongoing use.
Also note a very large portion of people that have ever smoked have had a nice cigar or pipe, smoked once in a blue moon is extremely unlikely to cause cancer or addiction. This likely represents a 'quiet' large portion of the statistic that have ever used tobacco. The loudest are the pack a day smokers who loudly proclaim everyone else will be like them and therefore everyone else should suffer restrictions that presume the same.
You must live in a democracy. If you ever lived in a country where the government curtailed freedoms by fiat, you'd understand that it can and it will. I happened to be living in Vietnam when the government just randomly decided one day that smoking would be banned everywhere, effective immediately. You might think that's simply putting a thumb on the scale; but you also haven't tried to visit the New York Times website from there and later found yourself in a room with officials asking for all your passwords. And clearly you're not familiar with the preferred way of clearing traffic jams, which is driving a jeep through a crowd of motorbikes while a guy with a long bamboo cane whacks anyone who's in the way.
Thumb on the scale my ass. Totalitarianism is control over the little things.
I'm not going to lose sleep over the idea of a smoking ban, since it was already driven to the margins, but the implementation of it by age is really weird. Clearly a move to avoid annoying pensioners, like everything else.
I disagree that age-based is weird: these are people who can't (yet) already do it, so they're not having something (current) taken away from them. It's a lot harder and crueller to say you're taking away something someone likes/does, even if they're not fully addicted to it.
Take away smoking from the next generation and they move to caffeine or vapes. Take away alcohol and there are revolutions and religious extremist revivals.
Those of us who don't smoke or vape can smell that shit a couple of hundred metres away.
Beyond whether something is "bad for you", the key aspect in a free society is whether the State should decide for you (we're entrusted with the right to vote, after all).
Demolition Man has turned out to be the most accurate prediction of the future regarding those issues among all the 90s movies. Quite interesting.
That's why smoking is already heavily regulated in order to limit and minimise the impact that your choice has on others.
But putting that aside, if a citizen supports banning cigarettes for people born after a certain date, but not alcohol, that certainly seems hypocritical to me.
I think it's very rare though for a smoker to not smoke several a day. A friend of mine was that rare breed and would buy a 10 pack occasionally - usually on a Friday and it'd be gone by Monday - but that would maybe be once a month. I think every other smoker I've met though goes through that amount every day.
So it seems to me the average smoker is much more likely to become a burden on a nationalised health service than the average drinker. There's more to this of course, smoking to excess generally doesn't increase the chances of you getting into a fight like drinking does for some people, but social pressure counters that partially too.
Basically everyone who smokes/etc is addicted to nicotine.
They aren't the same at all.
Edit: just realised I posted under the wrong comment. Doh.
Why does everyone on HN seem to have a hate boner for alcohol? The main problem there is car culture, not the alcohol.
In any case, the hypocritical part is where the UK, like many US states, has legalized marijuana for medical use and is well on its way to legalizing it for recreational use. Pipe tobacco at least smelled good. Cigarettes, not so much. But marijuana smells like a mix of stale cigarettes and body odor. AND the second hand smoke isn't just harmful, it can make you high along with the dirty smelling marijuana smoker. At least with nicotine, it sharpens your concentration. THC on the other hand makes you a lazy Cheeto eating couch potato with no future.
I don't really see how car culture has anything to do with stuff like domestic violence, child abuse, or various other side-effects of alcohol culture.
There is a difference that someone smoking nearby automatically harms people around you. With alcohol, the effect is more unpredictable, but it is equally real.
Alcohol is a factor in an automobile crashes, and a factor in a significant proportion of violent crime, especially domestic violence (https://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/09/17/mark-kleiman/taxatio... edit: this source isn't as great, Kleiman has written elsewhere about the subject, but google is failing me). If we could wave a magic wand and cause drinking to cease to exist, many lives would be saved.
Note: I do in fact drink, I am not a teetotaler. But what I said above is factual. I personally believe that prohibition would be worse, and it's reasonable for individuals to make their own choices. But that does not entail denying that it goes very badly for many.
Still a good idea to ban cigarettes and force people to consume their nicotine in healthier ways.
Congratulations!
Having said that I don't like the nanny society which acts like it knows better. People sometimes want to do stupid things and I think they should be able to do so. They should also not burden society with the consequences of their stupid actions so smokers either pay in more for health insurance or get relegated to the bottom tier - e.g. "palliative care for smoking-induced illnesses, no life-extending treatments for smoking-related diseases". No smoking where it impacts others negatively - this includes minors living in their house - but if they want to smoke where it doesn't impact others just let them do it.
Hah, alcoholics have done more damage to my life than a smoker could ever dream of.
What mechanisms do you foresee for it to fail? If stores stop selling cigarettes, the UK will have no other choice but to stop smoking them. I wonder what will come to replace them though. People have a peculiar tendency of forming addictive habits.
Regarding question 2, personally, I am uncomfortable with the idea of a nanny state.
The rules are made by politicians.
All it takes to change the rules is to rotate politicians.
Or enough public dissent that the same politicians are forced to revert the rules.
This might play right into the hands of bootleggers and gangs but also into the Swedish / American nicotine pouch industry which is basically marketing straight at kids.
Also - vapes. Most folks don’t smoke cigarettes anymore. How does this control vaping?
I am a fairly regular weed smoker. I used to grow my own. I used to smoke tobacco. I can go weeks, months and even years without smoking weed. Kicking my nicotine habit took many, many, many tries and I didn't even enjoy it! They are not the same.
It's like how everyone pat themselves on the back for banning child labor after the industrial revolution had rendered it obsolete outside a few niches that weren't economically important enough to put up a real fight.
Politicians "win" by pandering to voters and interests. So this is an obvious move since they can pander to all those people who grew up being told a cigarette takes a minute off your life while only pissing off some niche industry and a few smokers who are unwilling to vape.
It just seems completely absurd to me that a government thinks it's acceptable to treat a generation unable to vote differently from the generations who can. It's really an absurd unfreedom and a kind of tyranny.
Why not just pass a law that says people born after 2008 have to pay higher taxes, and work longer hours for less pay? People should be equal under the law.
We already do this, the UK State Pension age is currently rising from 66 to 67 for those born on or after April 6, 1960.
This change affects, for example, those born between April 1960 and March 1961, who will have a pension age of 66 plus a set number of months.
When I was young, it was 65 for men and 60 for women (from the 1940s until 2010)
My point here is that this is under 18s currently have no representation, and they're passing laws that will forever treat them as a kind of underclass, "for their own good." It's genuinely ridiculous that it's allowed to happen. In doing this, the UK -- for all it's progress a creating a mostly symbolic nobility -- will now allow a new kind of class system to emerge, where the young can be overtly dominated and discriminated against by the old. It's ridiculous. People should be equal under the law.
For example, some parties have a cannabis pledge and not enough people have wanted it as yet.
My son is 16, and will be impacted by this ban. He is constantly exposed to the temptation to smoke and vape. As a responsible parent, I want to do everything I possibly can to protect him and not become addicted.
We know that nearly all smoking starts before 26.
So the probability of starting smoking after 21 is roughly 2-5%. If someone hasn't started smoking by 21, they almost certainly never will. The brain's decision-making capacity isn't fully mature until ~25. People are getting hooked before they're neurologically equipped to properly evaluate the risk. People do not start smoking when they are grown-ass-adults.We owe our young people this protection, and I am a liberal.
But to take your point to full conclusion, Brexit was decided by the people that it impacts the least. And, "Since the Brexit referendum, 4+m voters have died (mainly Leavers), while almost 5m have reached voting age (overwhelmingly Remain), There is now a 1.6m majority for Remain - without anyone needing to change their minds". - https://www.thenewworld.co.uk/anti-brexit-britain-has-reache... - June 2023
This is one of the ways they broke the unions in the US. They offered agreements where new hires would get lower pay and fewer benefits than the old workers. Evil.
That in general is what inflation is
Cut off production so cigarettes are no longer made or imported. Don't block me from them while letting others have them. (Not in UK)
It'd be kinda funny to see an early 1900s / USA-style mafia / gangster resurgence of bootleggers over cigs in the UK. Much lower stakes, but black markets are a thing.
Edit: added "while letting others have them"
https://www.newfoodmagazine.com/government-bans-high-sugar-a...
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/soft-drink-levy-extended-...
There are good reasons to target smoking given how addictive and deadly it is. Nicotine is fairly unique in this regard.
I live in the USA where we are treated like crap by our system of government. I'd agree with you if we had national healthcare.
if this moves nicotine to the black market then the people/government will still pay the cost without receiving any taxes on it at all
I guess that liberty was plenty abused on every non-smoker in a non-smoking area, that ended up coughing in clouds of smoke anyway. Smoking affects everyone around you whether you want it or not, and while you may smoke for 50 years and end up being perfectly healthy, some may get cancer from it, even for a very small dose.
So is banning the sale of leaded gasoline.
When I was a smoker, I used to decry places that were less liberal about where I was allowed to smoke, and places with high taxes. As a former smoker, I know that the high taxes have enabled a lot of people to stop, and the restrictions got to a point where smoking was less "cool" and more "pariah" behavior. These influences helped me stop.
If you didn't read "The Easy Way to Stop Smoking", go do so, and smoke/vape no more.
If everyone appreciated how little value they receive from tobacco/nicotine and how easy it really is to quit, there would be no market.
"Why is the government stopping me from murdering people and stealing from them? it's my right to decide how I live!"
One of the most important foundations of democracy is that the law applies to everyone equally. If smoking is banned, it should be banned for everyone, not banned for some people and allowed for a privileged class who got here first.
I could argue (unsuccessfully) that it's discriminatory and unfair that I have to wait an extra 3 years to claim my pension compared to older people.
Unless their ancestors were already citizens beforehand.
Which I guess could be considered a more generous concession.
The title is hyperbolic. It isn't a ban on smoking. It's a "ban on buying cigarettes." Commerce is being restricted, not consumption. If, presumably, you bring your own in from France, or someone bums one to you, it would appear you're free to smoke it.
That broadly seems to strike a fair balance. Banning purchases and sales, not possession or consumption.
You still can pickup nicotine consumption, but with xx % less carcinogens :)
Moreover, essentially all behavior plausibly has "diffuse negative externalities". We should be very careful about adopting that ("harms others in diffuse ways") as a reasonable standard for banning some behavior.
The law (as proposed) restricts sales and giving to someone else, not the smoking itself.
https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/60034/documents/628...
If you’re a pothead who can’t make it through your day without a smoke, then god knows you’ll find a connect - and if you’re addicted to cigarettes, I’m pretty sure you won’t have much trouble getting your fix.
Just tax it very very heavily and apply education / social pressure?
[1] Technically, herbaceous plants.
Nicotine absolutely produces effects that people enjoy. Smokers don't just do it because they want to smell bad and look cool.
Drugs that are largely harmless, like MDMA, are illegal with heavy penalties.
Drug policy is largely nonsense and rampantly hypocritical.
An MDMA overdose, however, needs active, external cooling to ride out. We don't really have a natural safety valve for overconsumption.
That's not to say it should remain banned (I'm quite pro-legalization myself), but it's not entirely arbitrary to have MDMA banned versus other, less acutely dangerous drugs. Better examples of unjustifiably banned drugs are psychedelics such as LSD.
I find bewildering that such concepts are tried only centuries later, and wonder how it comes to be possible. Is it that we can finally enforce them, or that the lobbying have been gradually weakened, or enough data to drive decision, etc. ?
I could be totally wrong tho, but at least that's what it feels like. It feels like "all of them" smoke. Either vape or real cigarettes and quite a few of them using cigarettes
Not to say lobbyists don’t have an effect in the UK, they do. But the US has a particularly egregious setup.
I assume all the ones who were young enough to have worked tobacco at its peak are now working for Meta, OpenAI or Flutter.
As we know, smoking can cause lots of problems, including for babies if the mother smokes during pregnancy.
Most of the indoor smoking bans in the U.S. have been based entirely on the fact that second hand smoke affects the employees who are forced to be there.
Further, drinking has a far deeper cultural resonance, so smoking is clearly the lower hanging fruit.
And it’s not like the UK has not been taking action against drinking. For example, they’ve imposed minimum alcohol taxes which have been directly linked to lower consumption.
I should qualify the above: it doesn't affect random strangers as often as second-hand smoke does. But drunk driving and drunk violence are a thing, and both can affect anyone.
1. Alcohol 2. Heroin 3. Crack Cocaine 4. Cocaine 5. Tobacco
I think these laws are bizarre morality rituals. Evidence doesn't conclude it has anything to do with public health when you see how vicious alcohol is.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/alcohol-duty-rates
That cuts down on drinking, except for the alcoholics of course. Scotland also imposed a minimum price per unit on alcohol, in an attempt to further cut consumption:
https://www.gov.scot/policies/alcohol-and-drugs/minimum-unit...
Whether that works is an open question, but in the UK things like "the sugar tax" have a visible affect on consumer consumption rates of "bad things".
Alcohol is very difficult to ban as you can take almost any kind of sugar feedstock and turn it into alcohol.
"[..]provision prohibiting the sale of tobacco to people born on or after 1 January 2009[..]"
"I also really doubt that they will legalise weed and then say "but of course you're not allowed to smoke it, edibles only"."
I mean, there is still vaporization, so it wouldn't be edibles only?
It blows my mind how no other country in the world wants to follow their example on this. Are they too proud to copy a third world country? Even when it’s doing some things better?
But that's for another government to deal with, of course. Not our problem. Oh, and the future government will be happy to announce they are giving funding that will go to new jobs!
I propose a ban on people that use bans as a brain-less cheap way of fixing complex issues.
Given the massive cost smoking imposes on the health sector, I find it hard to believe that's remotely possible.
What I do favor of is making cigarettes highly inaccessible -- i.e., restrict the sale to a very limited number of licensed locations, impose high taxes so they're very expensive. If it's still fairly widespread, raise the taxes even more. I think we should do the same with Coke /Pepsi/etc.
Of course not. The only thing government and private enterprise seems good at these days is taking things away from people. Logic be damned.
Alcohol is another story, we're not ready to remove that yet.
It is fine to attempt to improve public health, but not at the cost of giving people a life worth living.
If you are a smoker, you are much more likely to be a burden on this system.
Makes sense to ban these types of activities if the costs of them are socialized rather than individualized.
My question is why aren't you or the people making these policies interested? It's consequential stuff done ignorantly and recklessly.
Determine scientifically how dangerous vaping nicotine or THC is before banning it. That's call rational. Not reckless
And freedom isn't absolute. There's no need to exaggerate 1984 style just because smoking is banned. You don't even have to stop smoking. You just can't start.
I think next we should ban them from eating butter, and you know, riding mountain bikes. Just protecting them you know.
What about us? Oh us, we're addicted, so... Well, you just can't take that away from us, can you? I mean there would be riots. But the kids, they wouldn't know what they're missing, right?
</sarcasm>
This is such a weird law. I doubt this would be constitutional in France. You can't just pass a law that affects some people but not others. It's against the principle of equality.
One of the principal jobs of government is to stand for the good of the collective against individual selfishness.
Some have bans on just diesel engines. Others ban combustion engines during some hours. Some inner-city congestion taxes have been introduced for health reasons.
There's a general trend of trying to "optimize" society to remove all ills, and once you apply that logic, there's no clear stopping point. Once you ban sale of tobacco products, you can use that same logic to ban anything, from Cheetos to skydiving to motorcycles.
I do. I prefer people not to get lung cancer, among other afflications. And for no benefit that I can think of.
I don't live in the UK, but I say: good to them, and boo to you, for your misanthropic attitude.
bucketing ppl by birth year is literally a discrimination.
I don't think so, but if the original poster is around...
Anyway, it's the government's business to keep their population out of trouble.
> bucketing ppl by birth year is literally a discrimination.
Contrary to popular opinion, discrimination isn't illegal or even undesirable per se. In this case, it has a health benefit.
"I don't want to be controlled" is a perfectly valid argument, and I prefer humans can make choices for themselves and have reasonable autonomy when it does not have a negative affect on others.
Vaccination and smoking affects people around you. Drinking does too - in certain cases, but much less directly, in most cases. For example, drinking and operating vehicles is already illegal. Drinking and punching someone is already illegal!
How far do you want to take this? Your choice of diet may have a negative effect on others by way of having to pay for additional medical care.
(No.)
But are you saying we don't care if things have negative effect on people? If we go to extremes, well then obviously everyone should have 100% autonomy? Oops that doesn't work.
So, this is the hard part - you have to find balance, compromise, a reasonable middle ground. That's always going to be the hard part. Not black or white, but the grey areas.
UK becomes the safest country in the world, peace forever
Funding the "biggest threat the UK ever faced" according to Phil Mykytiuk, who has spent a decade mapping tobacco crime gangs in the north of England with a customer base of 10-11 million potential customers and rising every year, will surely cut heavily into their profits…
It gets tiresome to buy a new house every week because the dry wall is full with cash, again.
"Yo, psst, want to buy some Lucky Strikes? You know what will go really well with that? This white widow super cheese, and if you feel tired I also got some soap for you, first line on the house." "You’re afraid your parents might smell it? I can get you a discount on this perfume, smells like Aventus but way cheaper."
-
"Mykytiuk, though, believes the multiple layers of crime behind cheap, illegal tobacco are escaping scrutiny, allowing crime gangs – emboldened by the lack of deterrent – to expand their power base right under the noses of enforcement.
Having witnessed Kurdish tobacco gang members invest heavily in property and high street businesses here in the UK, he’s now seeing evidence of them moving into cannabis farms.
“But forget drugs,” he says. “Drugs are yesterday. The big thing is tobacco. These gangs are becoming the most capable criminals in this country. Right now it’s the biggest threat we’ve ever faced.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/criminal-gangs-are-making-bi...
Props to this Vice reporter (in 2022) for snagging an interview with a municipal staffer in a suburb of Manchester, I guess. I’m sure he’s a very busy man. But he doesn’t exactly seem notable (try Googling his name) and I’m not really sure what this is supposed to prove in the absence of any corroborating reporting.
If I got you right, you’re doubting his credibility as a source after he was vetted by a journalist, because he is talking about organised crime openly and not having a website or a Substack with half a million followers?
Maybe the BBC from November last year is a more credible source for you? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0mx99ple17o
Time to ban alcohol, marijuana, Tylenol, fatty foods, sugar, candles, campfires, fireworks, food coloring, bicycles, playgrounds, cars, cell phones, and anything else that might be harmful
improved health outcomes?
[1] https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/article/more-than-23000-canadi...
EDIT: Headlinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headline#Headlinese