Rishi Sunak is considering introducing some of the world’s toughest anti-smoking measures that would in effect ban the next generation from ever being able to buy cigarettes, the Guardian has learned.
Whitehall sources said the prime minister was looking at measures similar to those brought in by New Zealand last December. They involved steadily increasing the legal smoking age so tobacco would end up never being sold to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009.
Creating a new illegal drug market.
In fairness, smoking tobacco is one of the few routes of administration where outlawing makes sense. The overall societal cost is very high, even for non-smokers, as in second-hand smokers and cigarette butts littering. It’s one of the few substances that health experts often recommend to make as unattractive as possible, be it through taxation or law.
I don’t really mind vaping or heating that much, I’d be fine with making cigarettes illegal while keeping the alternatives. Unfortunately, latest legislation has imposed higher burdens on the latter while doing jack about smoking.
Using the litter aspects of cigarettes as a reason to curb smoking has always been a tough one for me. Say someone quits smoking and takes up vaping. Now we have introduced plastic waste & to an extent e-waste in the form of batteries in the disposable vapes.
I don’t have an answer to it but I have at least thought about how there is no 100% environmentally friendly alternative outside of smoking straight tobacco leaf in rolling papers.
The “disposable” vapes are a different issue that needs to be tackled. I’m pretty sure that a meaningful deposit (5 or 10 euros) and the obligation for every seller to accept returns would solve the problem.
It works for beer cans!
In my part of the US, we hardly ever see beer or soda containers in litter. We do see liquor bottles, wine bottles, and sports-drink bottles as litter. Guess which drink containers have a deposit and cash redemption and which don’t?
The “bottle bill” works. It creates incentives for all sorts of people, from frugal homeowners to homeless folks, to collect and return containers. Applying it to other products that show up in litter would just make sense, especially dangerous ones like vape batteries or cartridges.
That is the most reasonable route. A “core charge” type of model where you get the addition fee waived if you bring in an old one.
Same scheme they use with car batteries and some auto parts. Although, some auto parts have a core charge as part of a dubious ploy to prevent the aftermarket from getting the headlight for duplication.
I’m not doubting you, but like, what r&d firm is gonna go, welp, this $50 core charge is too much for us, guess we won’t do it.
I forget what Chevy it was, but they just released a new model and the $2,500 headlight came with a $500 core.
Source: I ordered it.
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You can always ban disposable vapes? Requiring anyone that wants to vape to carry around those massive refillable batteries would do wonders to discourage people picking up the habit.
There are refillable vapes that aren’t that size. Though you do throw away the coil/juice container.
Haven’t seen one of em biguns in a while.
You’re forgetting the harm from all the fires (house, grass, and forest) caused by smokers too.
My understanding is that cig smokers actually save our NHS a fair bit of cash, as they die early & rapidly, and they’re a boon to the Exchequer due to the huge sin taxes we have
I think a larger more unnoticed social harm is the damage it does to single payer/socialized medicine. When you only have one insurance pool every person receiving healthcare related to smoking is funding that could have gone to treating diseases that aren’t as easily preventable.
The same goes for things like diabetes, which is absolutely destroying medicare. Right now one out of every three medicare dollars are being used to treat a completely preventable disease for the vast majority of those inflicted with it.
I think that if you want to smoke or drink tons of soda, that’s fine. But we shouldn’t be lessening the scope of healthcare coverage for other people just because of your bad habits. Either the industry making the money needs to subsidize the healthcare cost of their consumers, or the consumers themselves need to do it.
At least over here, taxation on cigarettes offsets the direct cost caused by smoking according to experts. That’s why I left it out, I do believe you’re allowed to be stupid and smoke. But keep the damage to yourself and make sure non-smokers aren’t paying for it one way or another.
So yeah your demand is at least partially already reality over here.
“taxation on cigarettes offsets the direct cost caused by smoking”.
By about 25 percent. I calculated it a few years back combining the total US taxes on tobacco (state, federal and local) and comparing it to the Medicare expenditures on treating the percentage of lung cancer caused by tobacco smoking. This is actually pretty skewed against my claims since tobacco isn’t always smoked so the tax from smoking is smaller than the total tobacco tax revenue, Medicare only pays for a portion of the lung cancer treatments (since not everyone uses Medicare but the private insurance data isn’t as available), and this is only one albeit expensive aliment caused by tobacco smoking. So 25 percent is a generous estimate.
Long story short “sin taxes” don’t actually pay for anything, it’s a complete myth mostly promoted by people who want to use the product.
I thought smokers ended up being cheaper for healthcare in the long run because they don’t live as long?
Smokers on average don’t die that much younger. But they do have a much less healthy end of life.
The life expectancy of male smokers, ex-smokers, and never-smokers at age 40 years was 38.5, 40.8, and 42.4 years respectively. In women, the corresponding life expectancies were 42.4, 42.1, and 46.1 years.
Women: don’t smoke, but if you do, never stop.
/s for good measure
For private healthcare maybe? A lot of the reasons private insurance groups are even somewhat functional is because the vast majority of healthcare cost are shifted over to medicare once people start falling apart.
Most things like cardiovascular disease and lung cancer happen in the late 50s or older. People who aren’t yet old enough for medicare will file for disability to access it earlier in the event of severe illnesses.
For-Profit healthcare is the scam here, not people drinking or smoking “too much,” whatever that means to you personally.
I’m fairly sure cig smokers are a net gain on the Exchequer
That becomes ammo against single payer, then. “If we get socialist medicine, they’ll bring back prohibition!”
My country already has a cigarette black market for cheaper imported cigs. Banning them won’t work it’ll only make it harder to regulate the industry.
Once you spark up it’s not obvious at a glance if the cigarette is duty paid or not. There’s a marked difference between a lit cigarette and no cigarette.
People will just smoke in bushes. Teens already do so they don’t get caught by their parents.
So by your logic, cigarettes shouldn’t be taxed at all?
Also, the way this is proposed kind of avoids the issue. People importing cigarettes already smoke, and they’ll be able to in the future because this only targets people born after a certain date to deter them from starting.
No, because I don’t believe a solution that captures every single black market cigarette is possible. The best solution is to heavily regulate the industry and spread accurate information about cigarettes and I’d also personally ban cigarettes in movies under a certain age rating unless essential to the character in some way such as they develop cancer later in the movie or something.
“the overall societal cost is high”
Just like every other drug. Everyone wants to legalise marijuana, ostensibly for the tax money (but not really), and yet it has far greater social costs than tax will recover. Even the states that legalise it (and consequently becoming tourist destinations) are not actually benefiting from it even though the “Las Vegas effect” means that they should disproportionately benefit from it.
What are the “far greater social costs” of cannabis compared to tobacco?
So the fact that we already have one awful policy (legal tobacco) is not sufficient to justify implementing another one. Marijuana seems to have roughly the same or slightly lower impact on lung cancer as tobacco (hard to measure since most people smoke both). Of course it has other harder to measure effects like long-term brain damage, and DUI risk, or even loss of economic productivity and workplace accidents.
The US (and most of the world) has been triumphantly marching towards banning smoking and yet we seem to be normalising the use of another substance that isn’t any better. It seems likely that we will be in the same place with marijuana in a few decades as we are with tobacco.
Edit: I realise that you may have not read my connected comment. Taxing tobacco doesn’t make the government money, lung cancer from tobacco smoking directly costs Medicare 4x the total tax revenue from all tobacco products. So that is my basis for “taxing legal tobacco is a poor policy” and by extension marijuana will be as well.
Shittest high ever. Only people already hooked would be interested and they could buy it legally anyway.
I got my first cig from a black market dealer. In my country black market dealers have popped up to get around taxes on cheaper foriegn cigs
For some. Some would ultimately quit and some would never start.
There can be some significant downside to a black market though. De-regulation could pose additional health risks to users as the product may be exposed to unknown and untested chemicals. Not to mention the additional violence and related crimes that always seem to accompany a black market. Prohibition didn’t work for alcohol. Prohibition isn’t working for Weed. Why do we think it will work for nicotine?
I think a big part of the difference is that most people get addicted to cigarettes just by being around it, rather than seeking it out. Cigarettes don’t get you high/drunk (well OK, you get a small buzz early on, but nothing like weed or alcohol).
People will seek out weed even when it’s illegal because the risk is worth the reward (to them), because it comes with an intense high you can’t really get anywhere else. I don’t see nearly as many people seeking out cigarettes in the same way, unless they’re already hooked.
I don’t think it will “solve” the cigarette problem, but I do think that prohibition for cigarettes won’t go quite the same route as prohibition for weed and alcohol.
Now, whether I want the government to be able to ban recreational substances just because they think it’s bad (or use that as an excuse) is another question
I don’t think you’ve seen how many high schoolers have a crippling nicotine addiction already
I got my first cigarette from a black market dealer. Cig prohibition will go the exact same way.
Except we have cleaner alternatives in the form of vaping. This isn’t like prohibition where all alcoholic beverages were banned, or like drug prohibition where all narcotics and hallucinogens are only accessible for medical need.
If you need nicotine, you can still buy it. Just not in cigarette form.
you can make it illegal to sell and only a fine for getting caught. Major retailers won’t do it, cornershops(“/bodegas” for the US) that sell under the counter will do it until they get caught, new ones won’t bother because they want their business to be a success, and honestly, probably make more money on chewing gum than black market fags
nicotine high isn’t worth the effort to a dealer to sell if you’re used to selling fent, coke, weed, triple sod, clarky cat etc
gone within a generation. if you really want it, go to France, smuggle it. it’s probably not worth it.
bodegas for the US
Mostly just the New York City area. In the Boston area they’re “packies” (not an ethnic slur – it’s “package store”) and most of the rest of the country it’s a “convenience store” or “corner store”.
Black market cigarettes is a very real thing actually.
fair comment but so is black market everything — from heroin to beanie babies.
Yea and the black market is one of the main reason things are harmful. 1 they r unregulated so your getting God knows what 2 they’re most likely connected to gangs or your countries version of them so ur prolly funding then and 3 it creates a stigma around the drug causing addicts to be less likely to seek out help
right but people still murder, even though murder is illegal
no one thinks that murder should be legal (except for the guys from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope)
Drugs are a personal vice which the person can do without ever harming another person. Murder is murder. I don’t think it should be legal for drug addicts to steal for their drugs, even tho some will whether or not its legal because that involves harming another person.
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If they want to ban tobacco let them first legalise weed, acid, and psylocybin. That’d be a fair trade.
Why are cocaine fent oxy schedule 2?
Legitimate medical uses, at least for fent and oxy
Then why’s marijuana schedule 3?
All these progressively restrictive laws have been good to me. I’m of the generation who remembers smoking on planes, and my grandmother smoking in her hospital bed.
I was probably at two packs a day in the nineties because it was cheap and acceptable.
These days, a pack will last me a week, and I only ever smoke in my backyard at home, in clothing dedicated to the habit that get washed separately from my other clothes.
Bans and social stigma have forced me into near non-smoking without ever consciously trying.
Do I ever have an occasional night of celebratory drinking where I exceed that trend? You betcha, and I don’t feel sorry about it. But I’m glad that I’m not the chain smoking beef jerky with a voice three octaves lower than it should be that my grandparents were.
I still believe that people should be able to enjoy vice and that you shouldn’t be completely ostracized from society for not living a perfect organic free range fair trade intoxicant free perfectly vegan whatever else life.
But to phase out tobacco as it has been going, I have found that I haven’t minded at all in the long term.
(As to the occasional celebratory night, for completely different reasons, I hardly drink anymore. Also was not a conscious choice or effort. It just lost its attraction for me)
What’s a “progressively restrictive law”?
The first smoking bans were sections of airplanes
Then they were for domestic flights under two hours
Then they were for domestic flights
Then they were for all flights
The first restaurant bans were only the dining area
Then they included the bar area
Then they hit stand alone bars
The smoking bans you know today did not hit all at once. They got progressively more restrictive over a period of many years.
Back many many moons ago in the year 2008 I traveled to the great city Vancouver to see a friend. They took me to a venue to see a band and cigarette smoking wasn’t allowed.
But you bet your fucking ass there was plenty of people smoking weed. Which seems to be just fine…breathing in second hand smoke…which is the main reason these tabacco restrictions are in place.
EDIT
I don’t care if you smoke weed, only it has the same second hand smoke issue tabacco does and should follow the same rule.
It smells so much worse too
I remember going to restaurants as a kid and being asked if we wanted the smoking or non-smoking section. It seems kind of surreal these days that this was ever a thing. I’m probably the last generation to remember indoor smoking.
In the US, cigarette smoking had already peaked and begun to decline before smoking bans. The bans almost certainly accelerated the decline, though.
A law that is slightly more restrictive than the last that will be followed by a slightly more restrictive law.
Stopping cigarette companies giving away packs of 5 outside colleges if you could prove you were over 16 was a sensible progressively restrictive law that followed to them not being displayed in shops and having warnings in the packets for example.
Man, my freshman year of college, in California of all places, we had cigarette vending machines in our freshman dorm. The only smoking policy in your dorm room was that your roommate had to be cool with it. Zero designated non-smoking rooms. There was a smoking section inside the cafeteria. You couldn’t smoke during class, but the professors could smoke in their offices and we had a coffee bar in the building that was one huge cloud.
How things have changed, eh?
About bloody time. Cigarettes are disgusting and do nothing but immense harm to those who smoke them, and those around them.
Sunak is a tosser, but cigarettes are a no brainer. Sure, old boomers still smoke them, but only the dumbest young people still smoke, and most of them use e-cigs (which are still bad, but nowhere remotely near as bad).
Several of my grandparents died before I could ever know them because of smoking, for example. Fuck smoking. Smoking kills.
Two of my grandparents died before my birth because they smoked. I smoked. I still vape. I hate that companies make money on addiction. This is still stupid.
The lesser evil is well-regulated companies than whatever-goes black market sources.
Tried going cold Turkey today, made it like 14 hours.
It’s the right thing to do. It’s a very hard addiction to escape. I know a guy who beat heroin and can’t beat nicotine.
It took me years to quit, I slowly cut cigs out of my daily activities.
Good on you! That’s awesome. thankfully I’m not inhaling anything anymore, but damn if it’s hard to quit the substance entirely. Big ups to everyone who made it out though.
Yeah its tough, just do your best and stick with it. Now my only nicotine is from a cigar a few times a year.
Nice, what type? I’m not a cigar guy, but if I ever encounter a Cohiba I’m going to try it.
Just random cigars from samplers like Rocky Patel, Oliva, Romeo y Julieta. Had a Cohiba my buddy brought back a while back. It was good but not mind blowing.
One day at a time. Keep trying. It’s absolutely worth it.
I recently quit. I’m about 6 weeks since my last patch. A relapse is exceedingly unlikely.
Going cold turkey would never have worked for me. Cut down > switch to patches > taper off.
Ban alcohol too or it’s hypocrisy once again.
Checks history
Wait a minute…
ban every single drug and watch how wrong its gonna go
they simply cannot stop repeating the mistakes of the past can they
I’m very pro-legalization but honestly tobacco is a shit drug. No real high, very addictive and awful health effects. I don’t see many people going through the hassle of maintaining their addiction illegally if it was banned everywhere.
I don’t see many people going through the hassle of maintaining their addiction illegally
Tobacco addicts are on another level. I’ve met people who kicked cocaine but couldn’t quit cigs.
Shit, where I live cigarettes are expensive and there is already a gray market for untaxed tobacco.
You could say its harder to quit cigs because it’s more publicly available though.
I think the reason tobacco is so hard to kick is just because there’s no immediate deleterious effects. Why quit this week when you could quit next week or next month?
I know, I am one :( But I also know that if I had to go to a dealer to buy cigarettes, I couldn’t smoke in public and it was as socially frowned upon as hard drugs I’d have a much easier time quitting.
banning is never the answer. people will migrate to a different dissociative substance and it’ll increase bootlegs and criminal activity.
This doesn’t matter. The question is whether a ban constitutes a greater social harm than legalisation. The fact that people can evade the ban doesn’t matter, after all murder is illegal but people still do it (at a much lower rate).
Yea the one reason I’m against flat out legalization of every drug (only wanting decriminalization) is because people who shouldn’t have access to the drug would have significantly easier access to the drug (just having someone buy it for them). Primarily kids, since they practically constantly do that with cigarettes and alcohol and have started especially doing it recently with vapes and weed as weed has become less and less banned. I’m pretty confident a majority of high schoolers vape and that’s because they’re very easy to legally get and therefore they usually have someone buy them for them, and also a lot just get sold vapes by the vendors anyways and neither the vendor nor the buyer really stand a chance of getting caught just because of how little you can do to actually control that (without relying on a bunch of kids just going and telling cops “this place sold us vapes”)
Kids obviously aren’t immune to doing crack or heroin now but if it were just legalized it’d make sense that the amount of them abusing it illegally would become wayyyy higher. And that really IS a (big) problem, unlike shit like books that don’t follow a certain agenda or drag queen story hour. It could screw up a large portion of the population for their young life. Best you could do to prevent such effects is teach how to be safe with drugs and how to prevent/reduce certain bad things from happening (already good idea anyways), and to implement draconian (and expensive & time/resource consuming) measures that would make monitoring all the children & drug stores extremely closely at almost all times a possibility so you could nip the bud of any absurdities like adults giving/selling drugs to students early on.
I agree to a point. However I think that decriminalisation fails to recognise that drug courts are quite effective at rehabilitation. It’s important to minimise the effects of imprisonment and criminal record for drug offences that way individuals always have an opportunity to higher income careers. (Although from my experience, competitive jobs markets ignore drug felonies and sometimes even violent felonies). The solution isn’t to completely defang the state and just hope that people decide to quit drugs while dealing with all the problems they cause along the way. States need to have some ability to pressure individuals to rehabilitation.
The latter part of your comment is just leftist conspiracism. The percentage of false arrests is heavily out weighed by guilty parties getting away. You can easily find this by both reading papers on it or just going to your local homeless shelter and talking to people. An encounter with police is much more likely to involve you getting away with a crime than falsely accused.
Prison labor is also not profitable, the majority of prisons are publicly run. The idea that high incarceration rates are because the state somehow makes money by enslaving people is completely false.
the problem is how that ban is evaded.
historically this creates drug lords and an illegal drug trade
How would that even work? You can easily make alcohol at home, can’t exactly do that with tobacco.
Smoking is one of the very few things everyone is better off not doing.
Same with alcohol, but I don’t think we’re allowed to say that yet. Maybe one day!
American prohibition and the war on drugs has shown that toal band like that really just make consumption worse while piling a whole new slew of problems onto an existing issue.
I wholeheartedly agree with ya there, but would smoking be carried on in the same fashions as drugs and booze?
I quit years ago after thirty years of smoking and while it was hard as fuck, and i was nasty as a human for a while, I didn’t get the urge to find plug for smokes or off up ass for a pack of butts. Or kill anyone for that matter.
Here in Canada the jump in price has reservation smokes selling like fucking crazy. My old Racist as fuck neighbor bent his morals just enough to say his buying them was justified. I am pretty sure old Dar would drop and blow a herpes staff for a smoke, so I am probably already wrong to question it.
While people may not be willing to kill or rob someone to get a pack of smokes, there will absolutely be a black market for them that will be rife with unsavory characters that will. I live an hour away from a recreational marijuana state and it has destroyed the local black market for pot as anyone who wants to get high can just drive across the state line and get their own pot. No more sketchy drug dealers pushing other substances, no more police stings to catch teenagers buying dope.
Buying controlled and reasonably dangerous substances from licensed retailers like a dispensary, grocery store, or even a gas station is a lot safer for everyone than trying to keep tabs on a black market. The danger of prohibition wasn’t alcoholics trying to find their next drink, it was mobsters like Capone trying to dominate the black market for popular goods.
Edit since i misread what you meant: Sure tobacco is on it’s way out as is, but nicotine consumption is still skyrocketing. I dont see how banning tobacco sales for anyine born after a certain date like Sunak is proposing will help anything. People under 30 are already way less likely to smoke tobacco but consume unhealthy quantities of nicotine anyway.
This just isn’t true though. Other countries ban alcohol and it doesn’t turn into what happened during American alcohol prohibition. Nor does it mean banning needs to be done like it was done during that period either. You people gotta start thinking a bit deeper about stuff.
What countries have successfully banned alcohol? Besides Muslim countries that employ capital punishment.
The Chiapas state of Mexico.
Lol sure. The worst country in the world for narcotics trafficking?
Do you pick out Alabama when you talk about the entirety of the US? Or do you tend to be less xenophobic and less racist?
Do not disagree it not good. But until you can indicate passive damage to non drinkers. You will find it hard to argue for the ban in society. Only actions of drinkers that may effect other will ever be considered an issue.
Only actions of drinkers that may effect other will ever be considered an issue.
Yeah and we should ban cars to get rid of drunk driving tbh
If we ban oxygen all crimes would stop. And the planet would soon recover.
Fortunately we are democratic enough not to listen to outright stupid ideas. Or to punish all for the stupidity of some.
In any context, this is the most infuriatingly fucking stupid argument there is.
“well we should ban…”
Instantly stupid. just add human.
IMHO they should ban all types of smoking. If people want to eat weed brownies and nicotine chewing gums, I don’t care. But smoking just smells bad and is really unpleasant to be around in the street.
Just ban smoking drugs and combustion engine. I just want clean air.
Neither of those things are even like, the top 3 things that are stopping you from having clean air.
If he/she lives in Denver it is! lol
Um… The cow shit from Greeley!
Oh! How could I forget lol! Ive only experienced it once but i dont live in Denver. Worst smell experience of my life.
Living in a tolerant society means that we need to be willing to deal with these little inconveniences in our lives. One of my neighbours has kids who love to play on a go-kart and wake me up at 6am on a Saturday morning, sometimes I can smell people barbecuing even though I’m vegan, and so on.
As long as it’s not a direct risk to health (e.g. smoking indoors) and not extremely obnoxious (playing extremely loud music and refusing to turn it down) people should be able to do what they want to.
One of my neighbours has kids who love to play on a go-kart and wake me up at 6am on a Saturday morning
As long as it’s not … extremely obnoxious (playing extremely loud music and refusing to turn it down)
I’m not sure I see a meaningful difference here. And why is it you don’t see polluting the air to be a direct health risk? If you wanted to ride a bike or walk instead of drive everywhere, I’m sure you’d see how car exhaust doesn’t just disappear immediately.
I’m sure if I asked the parents of the kids if they could ask them to wait til after 9am to play on the go kart they probably would, I have a lower expectation of “polite” behaviour from kids and I don’t want to take their fun away from them, you’re only young once and I don’t really begrudge them it.
For vehicle exhaust, we’re basically already solving the problem by moving away from ICE vehicles, so I don’t see the reason in arguing about it.
Alright, but why is it okay for you to decide that some noise is okay, but Ronon Dex can’t decide that the air pollution isn’t? Why do you get to make that decision for them, and just say “you have to deal with some problems in a tolerant society”?
For vehicle exhaust, we’re basically already solving the problem by moving away from ICE vehicles, so I don’t see the reason in arguing about it.
Because there’s more than one way of generating air pollution and some would argue that the transition isn’t happening fast enough, or even that transitioning to electric cars isn’t really a solution.
Alright, but why is it okay for you to decide that some noise is okay, but Ronon Dex can’t decide that the air pollution isn’t?
My position is pretty simple: we should prioritise personal freedoms over personal preferences, as long as our actions are not significantly harmful to others, then there shouldn’t be any laws forbidding those actions.
Is OP harmed by someone smoking weed in the middle of nowhere? No. Yet they want to ban it. They said that there should be a ban on all kinds of smoking. Total authoritarian nonsense.
The car thing, there’s a reason I completely ignored that part of the comment, it is totally irrelevant to anything I wrote and I’m not going to engage with it, sorry.
as long as our actions are not significantly harmful to others, then there shouldn’t be any laws forbidding those actions.
But you’re not being consistent about what “significantly harmful” even means. Loud noises apparently counts, but only if you want it to. Air pollution doesn’t, even if you think it should.
Is OP harmed by someone smoking weed in the middle of nowhere?
To be fair, they specifically said “smoking just smells bad and is really unpleasant to be around in the street”, so presumably they only really care about the ban when it’s near other people and would be enforceable in the first place. So if no one’s around, do what you want, but near other people you shouldn’t smoke. That goes along rather neatly with your ‘personal freedoms so long as there isn’t harmful to others.’
It’s nothing to do with “me”, it’s more to do with reality. There are plenty of studies which show that a lack of sleep leads to significant health issues. Likewise, yes, air pollution also does. But we’re not talking about coal power plants here, we’re talking about people smoking cigarettes. There’s tons of evidence which shows that they are essentially harmless to others if smoked outdoors. That’s why preventing people from getting sleep matters, but smoking outdoors does not.
I’m not going to engage with the other thing you wrote, except to say that OP said that smoking should be banned with no additional qualifiers, in my view, everything else they wrote was explaining why they felt that way. I’m not going to argue that point though, because it’s not relevant.
I don’t think that is realistic.
If you can make it literally easier than stuffing a wad in a pipe and burning then yay!!! Otherwise go back to the drawing board.
Didn’t he just say yesterday that he didn’t want the government to butt into people’s lives? I thought that was why he abandoned all those laws which didn’t exist. You know, the meat tax and the 7 bins xD
This’ll have even bigger environmental impact than damaging social structure.
prohibition still doesn’t work
People saying that’s a good decision are simply unqualified to talk about it, they’re completely clueless and willingly ignorant, just like sunak and his fking delusional confidence. How is it not obvious that people will refer to black market tobacco? Has history AND WHATS HAPPENING LIKE RIGHT NOW IN GOD DAMN REAL TIME not fking taught you all what banning drugs does? Because of people like you other people will die. That’s also YOUR responsibility, not just theirs. It’s YOU who affect their decision. And it’s not just the fact that it’s black market and people will just die, it’s also the fact that underground, potentially mafia-like organisations will have MORE POWER. You all LEGIT make me believe in totalitarian governments. I simply can not handle the confident ignorance.
Like imagine a society where 1/4 of the population is forced to quit cold turkey. Y’all are fking insane
It’s very easy to compare this to The Prohibition but the reality is alcohol is much more popular than tobacco. For someone who doesn’t drink, understanding the appeal of drinking in a social setting is way easier. With this law I don’t think there is a need for a black market of tobacco like there was with alcohol as it will still be available to purchase, just more controlled. The effect will be a reduction in exposure in younger generations that simply won’t find the need to start smoking. This works and in my province of Quebec since laws have been getting stricter the only people that still smoke are poor or raised by heavy smoker parents.
Smoking is still more popular than soft drugs, and the same prohibition logic argues against marijauna laws quite nicely.
Also, doing home made alcohol is pretty easy and pretty dangerous too, this is why is better to have it legal, regulated and restricted. Try to grow up your own tobacco.
Growing tobacco is surprisingly easy depending on your environment, I guess. I know it definitely grows in the desert where I lived at the time.
The harder part is actually curing it correctly after harvesting it. The curing process requires the right humidity and temperature and takes a while.
You still gonna need a lot of time and effort to growth enough for normal consumption.
My first cigarette was bought from a black market dealer involved with the uda my countries main drug gang. Prohibition doesn’t work
“WELL WHAT ABOUT” shut up, oh shut up. Ban drug = force people to do unsafe things to get an unsafe version of the drug. It’s simple. That’s how it worked, that’s how it works RIGHT NOW, and that’s how it will continue to work unless something fundamental changes in the society. Exposure won’t be reduced. Kids get tobacco illegally anyways. Nothing is changing for them. Next step after that is underground production of tobacco products which means PEOPLE WILL DIE
Did you read the article? The legislation steadily increases the legal age limit so that kids don’t get hooked on tobacco in the first place. No one will have to “quit cold turkey”.
One of the biggest issues with the war on drugs is that it criminalizes the use of certain drugs. This doesn’t do that.
As for your claim about a black market and a mafia:
we have already taken steps to reduce smoking rates. This includes providing 1 million smokers in England with free vape kits via our world-first ‘swap to stop’ scheme
They’re still providing people with tobacco, just a less-deadly kind. Comparing that to the war on drugs is ridiculous. The point of the war on drugs isn’t to get people to quit using dangerous drugs recreationally, every reasonable person wants that. The point of it is to control minorities and poor people. That’s absolutely not what’s happening here.
None of this is to defend Sunak btw, he’s a broken clock that happens to be right in this instance.
You left out the part where kids get tobacco anyways and this will just make it unsafe for them and that WILL cost their lives. It WILL kill someone’s child.
Btw war on tobacco is war on drugs. Tobacco is a drug. Making it irrelevant in people’s minds is the way, not formally banning it
I think it’s a good decision.
Well maybe think a bit better idk? Maybe learn to read too? Cuz I literally pointed out objective (emphasis on this word) reasons why that’s a bad idea
It’s a great idea actually.
Imagine trying to troll people on this topic😐 bruh
The (stopped?) trend in the US had been to tax cigs to make them unaffordable. Just before the last major hike, my brand was about $5/pack. Now it is $10-12. So glad I quit.
Is that a viable strategy, to continue tax/price hikes?
Did it stop you smoking? If so, then yes it worked.
Every 10% increase in cigarette tax results a 4% reduction in consumption among adults, and a 7% decrease amongst youth. Source
It was a minor motivator for me. Bigger ones were things like not dying and my son.
Interesting stats, thanks.
It’s a hella regressive tax though… and we know social ad campaigns actually work.
I went to Niagara Falls in 2004, and I was a little perplexed with the stop smoking campaign flyers attached to the back of individual cigarette packs (pictures of rotten teeth, black lung, etc.). Ended going over to New York to buy smokes because they were SIGNIFICANTLY less expensive and without the flyers.
I mean taxes change habits, there is no doubt about that. Some people quit, some people buy illegal cigarettes imported from the south, others buy Indian cigarettes, others stop smoking, some roll their own with pipe tobacco that no one has ever smoked In a pipe. But the ad campaigns worked surprisingly well for long term smoke cessation. They really did nip it in the butt
I was paying $14 a pack when I quit 6 weeks ago in NYS. The gum is working out great so far and I feel so much better. 17 years smoking regularly. They should be banned everywhere, sorry fellow smokers. It’s a disgusting, nasty habit that is incredibly hard to break.
I’ve been on zyns for a while now, my lungs do feel so much better. It’s hard to quit the substance, but it’s easier than ever to take it in without inhaling anything.
Good for you! Enjoy your journey to better health!
They’ve been doing that in New Zealand. A pack is now $50. Violent robbery of gas stations and corner stores for them have massively increased
Good
Legalise weed but ban tobacco!
Just saying.
Alcohol is a bigger problem in the UK.
Alcohol is a problem most places. Best thing I ever did for myself was quit drinking entirely.
Not drinking at all and drinking far less is actually trending up significantly with younger demographics in the UK. It’s the older generations who’ve got the real problems. A law like this wouldn’t do anything to help with that.
I wouldn’t count too much on younger generations drinking less forever. Smoking was in decline here for years for younger demographics but recently went back up. The same might happen for alcohol. You never know.
