There are two separate issues here: 1. will this work (will the UK stop smoking) 2. is this something the UK government should be doing
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.
> other things (alcohol) that cause problems and are not being restricted
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.
Sounds like a great way to avoid alcohol addiction, prevent drunk driving deaths, and save countless generations from being negatively impacted in one way or another by alcohol.
Prohibition doesn't work because people want to modulate their consciousness, chemically force-relax, reduce inhibitions, etc. It didn't work before, and it won't in the future. The more things are forbidden, the more taboo and attractive they become.
This banal, smiling, petty authoritarianism sickens me. Bodily autonomy trumps "common good" arguments, and where it somehow doesn't, injustice abides. Society's job isn't to crush individualism in order to create the safest and most financially efficient outcome. Shall we throw everyone in prison for their safety and protection next, and control their diet to ensure maximum healthspan and potential for participation in the labor market?
Rather than banning anything, point out at an early age that cigarettes stink, get you addicted, cost money forever, and cause health problems. Point out that alcohol makes you fat and causes heart problems and cancer. The accept that each person has the right to make a decision for themselves about what risks they're willing to accept to achieve a desired outcome, and that they have to own those consequences.
Don't want to pay for smokers' lung cancer treatment? Then only fund palliative care for smoking-related cancers. Man enough to smoke a pack a day, man enough to buy smokers' insurance. There, now we can live free.
Smokers already more than pay for their healthcare so punishing them further is silly. Not only is their lifetimehealthcare cheaper, because smoking disqualifies you from many procedures and kills most users right around retirement age before the expensive age-related care becomes common, but the sin-tax collected from smokers in most countries is larger than the average lifetime medical care cost.
It's basically taxing people for saving everybody else money.
An interesting point. So over the next ~60 years, the UK has committed itself to having to find a replacement for all the tax revenue that will be lost by eliminating tobacco products. Additionally, the number of people with longer lifespans will increase, necessitating more late-life care delivery through the NHS, which will also have to be funded.
Outcome: this will cost everyone a lot of money. Time to raise the retirement age to 80!
In huge agreement with you. But can it be done in a different way that doesn't create the black market problems of the prohibition era? (Do we have a better chance now with gen z's aversion to drugs/alcohol?)
It’s awesome to decide what your children, once they are adults, can’t do? Seems borderline psychopathic. Kinda sums up democracy in current times though.
> It’s awesome to decide what your children, once they are adults, can’t do?
You do realize that this is what basically every single law in existence does, right?
That my kids, and likely yours, once they're adults, can't drive under the influence, rob a bank, impersonate a cop, lie under oath, exercise medecine without a licence, walk downtown naked, jaywalk, evade taxes, criticize the King?
I've seen confusion about this before with people that I know.
You tell them it's against the law to drink, and they'll point out that it's restrictive and controlling. You tell them it's against the law to commit tax fraud, and they'll have no objection.
Why? I think, at least with the people that I know, it's related to what they want to be able to do. They want to be able to drink alcohol, so it feels controlling to tell them they can't. They aren't interested in committing tax fraud, so they're not bothered by that being restricted.
If you check it the other way around, you'll get consistency. Almost everyone that is against taxation is also against restrictions on consuming drink.
If you ask an addict then yeah you'll get some gibberish that enables them whether it fits into a logical paradigm or not.
Well to be fair, it's not that they can't, it's that society is telling them there will be repercussions if they're caught. You can still technically do whatever you want.
Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army.
People have been using tobacco for many thousands of years. if they want to use it knowing full well the consequences, they should be able to. Unless we also ban things like skydiving, rock climbing, and fast cars and motorcycles, it makes no sense to me.
Why isn't prohibiting something known to cause harm a good thing? Plus, smoking doesn't just harm the individual doing it, its harm extends to those in the immediate (and sometimes not so immediate) vicinity, as well as the environment. There is literally zero good to gain from it.
If future generations want to smoke, they can change the law as easily as yours passed it.
Running government budgets further and further into deficit, believing that, as a result, your children will, some day, be in a stronger financial position to repay the resulting debt that, until that day, continues to grow at an ever-increasing rate?
That's not how politics works, and you probably know it. "Easily passing laws" is not a matter of voting demographics but of political power, and any thinking person knows political power usually does not belong to younger voters.
I’m having a hard time coming up with a better way. Simply banning all manufacturing and import is not going to work when it’s heavily addictive. In the case of alcohol, quitting cold can kill you.
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.
If they wanted to ban cigarettes, they should have banned cigarettes. The whole "let's pass a law that only affects people who can't vote" strategy applied here is tyranical.
That doesn't sound like a win to me, it sounds ultra authoritarian and restrictive. Prohibition has never cured us of a drug problem and tobacco is no different. You think jailing someone for decades for selling tobacco should be a thing? Because that is what such a policy will do.
I think making a society more healthy should be a goal.
You already can’t legally do a lot of things that appear to only be about yourself because society as a whole said it’s not good for everyone. You can’t buy cocaine. You can’t commit suicide (it’s illegal almost everywhere) . You can’t ride a motorbike without a helmet, or drive a car without a seatbelt. You can’t even build a house without a smoke detector or remove the airbags from your own car.
To some degree, if you want to, go buy 100 acres in the middle of nowhere and go nuts. Or move to a country that doesn’t care about all those things.
If you want to be part of a modern clan, it’s not helpful to do things that indirectly hurts everyone, even if on the surface it only impacts you and your body.
If you want all the benefits of a modern society, it asks you to not be a net negative.
This is 10x important in countries with universal healthcare, ie all but one.
The US did the same thing with cockfighting. It was already illegal in all the states, but they passed a federal law binding on all states and territories to stop Puerto Ricans (who had no such law against it), who have no meaningful federal representation.
No, but my point is this argument isn't really consistently applied. The excuse about a law made specifically to apply against people that can't vote is quite popular and accepted. The cockfighting law was cheered by most the mainland US, while Puerto Rico desperately fought against it, though they weren't able to get cert in SCOTUS to challenge it.
There was never really much of any concern of "wait, Puerto Rico has no representation in the law that was essentially drafted to target specifically them." All these people claiming to not support the smoking laws on this kind of basis were nowhere to be found. The law passed like a thief in the night.
Alcohol is quite different to cigarettes. It's fun and part of the culture - most people drink and the country is full of pubs and restaurants serving it. You couldn't ban it without most of the country, including me, objecting.
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.
If you look at the US about 50% have ever smoked some form of tobacco at least once. Only 11-15% currently do.
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.
I think it is also part of a trend. More and more control over people's lives, more and more bans.
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.
I see smoking as a separate category owing to the existence of second hand smoke. Smoking in a room with other people adversely affects those people. I think government is the correct body to be intervening in that scenario.
No indoor smoking makes a major difference, but there still are enough semi-stationary semi-close-up situations where smokers can be still rather annoying, e.g. outdoor seating in cafes and restaurants, popular lunch break spots in parks and plazas, public transport stops, next-door neighbours… And even if you manage to position yourself upwind of all pre-existing smokers, there's no guarantee that a few minutes later somebody upwind of you suddenly won't light up…
Yes, this is one of the reasons there is resistance to socialized health care. People view it as opening the door to the government controlling what they due due to health care costs.
Sure, I dislike smoking, I really don't drink that much either.
But then it leads to questions such as; What about birth defects? What about extreme sports(risk of permanent injury)?
There was a scandal in Canada recently about veterans asking for medical care and being push to assisted suicide:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/veterans-maid-rcmp-investig...
>MacAulay walked the committee through what his department knew, thus far, saying the first case that came to light occurred last summer where the caseworker repeatedly pushed the notion of MAID to an unnamed veteran who had called seeking help with post-traumatic stress.
Solving it with money doesn't really solve it unless there's "real" competition.
Look at automotive insurance points systems. People have to buy it so the sellers lean on the legislatures and before you know it a ticket costs the same points and screws you out of just as much money as an actual accident.
>That seems appropriate. A small fraction of people cause most of the losses, they should pay more.
Surely that was a satirical comment and was meant to be an illustrative example of exactly the sort of mindset that runs political cover for a system as it pivots from providing enough value to become entrenched to using that entrenched position to behave in an extractive manner.
In my state if grandma gets pulled over for an out of date inspection sticker it's the same number of points as actually causing an accident. Someone is being fleeced.
I have zero faith that letting the government choose at the behest of industry who ought to pay more for healthcare that it wouldn't devolve into the same exact sort of exercise in finding a reason to charge everyone more.
I’ve never seen having an expired tag be a points violation, that seems very wrong. IME it’s only ever moving violations that impact safety. For that, higher rates are absolutely appropriate.
Safety inspection. It's a moving violation in this state (of course it wasn't initially, frogs are best boiled slow). That's the magic of it. Frame it as a "safety" issue and everyone who can't think critically about how that sausage might be made will knee jerk approve.
If I was an auto insurer, I would want to know that my policy holders were properly maintaining their vehicles. I would also have a strong interest in ensuring that non-policy holders did the same.
And as a driver, I certainly want everyone around me to be required to properly maintain their cars.
I'm not gonna let the goal posts move here. That still doesn't make it a moving violation on par with driving like a dick and/or causing an accident.
What you're saying seems to make sense on face value but in reality letting insurance leverage safety inspections is just a politically less thorny wealth proxy. The inspections themselves don't provide all that much value (IMO this is because of how comprehensive they are, 90/10 rule and all that) and multiple states have ended their programs because they don't actually provide meaningful improvement for the money.
Regardless, even if there is somme hand wavy justification for it that some people agree with, it's flawed to the point it's probably not something we want to do with medical because it would make insurance unaffordable for so many people on flimsy at best pretexts.
I don’t think the argument as a whole is a fallacy, it’s true that the exact cost to the NHS is more than covered by tax, but most estimates of wider cost to the economy (e.g. lost productivity, disability benefits, etc) is higher.
https://fullfact.org/health/farage-smoking-revenue-nhs/
It's equally a fallacious argument to try to fit "cost to the economy", whatever that means, to the healthcare cost (usually this is done to inflate costs to fit the narrative). By that logic, ban everything and allow only what allows individuals to maximise their productive labour... what a nightmare.
That's not a separate category, that's the general principle in a free society: There is a limit to "doing what you want" when it impacts others/imposes on them.
That's why smoking is already heavily regulated in order to limit and minimise the impact that your choice has on others.
I think you could make the same argument about alcohol and drugs (road fatalities + some absurd number of convicted criminals were high/drunk when perpetrating the crime) - I’m not taking a side either way but I don’t think smoking is unique in terms of harm to society there besides the user.
On reddit, not so long ago, they were inventing interesting theories about how seat belt laws were justified because without seat belts people would be ejected from cars and kill by standards when their flying carcasses cannonballed through them.
The claim that "it impacts others" is, at very minimum, exaggerated, but just as often completely fabricated out of pseudoscience and absurd movie plots.
Smoking is heavily regulated because there was a resurgence of teetotaling in the late 20th century.
Remember when seat belt laws came out in the United States, they (at least in the states I was in) vehemently promised up and down that it would always be a secondary offense and never would be allowed to become a reason to pull you over?
It impacts first responders. Not only is it bad to respond to an accident with a fatality, it's worse if you can see the would've likely been fine had they worn a seat belt.
I agree that having other people smoking nearby can be unpleasant, but you might find some comfort in Sir Richard Doll's opinion on second hand smoke - that the risks were politically and publicly exaggerated beyond what the epidemiological evidence clearly supported.
Personally - aside from the smell - I have no concerns about people smoking near me outdoors or even in very well ventilated areas. I understand though that for some people (such as asthmatics) it can be a real problem that goes beyond simply being unpleasant.
In fact one of the most important fire disasters in England, the Kings Cross fire started because nicotine addicts used to light up on their way out of the tube (which had already prohibited smoking, it's kinda crazy to imagine people in the 1970s used to smoke on the fucking underground railway, deep under the ground where you are unavoidably breathing the same air as everybody else)
Somebody probably drops a spent match, it's still smouldering and it drops inside the escalator where it finds plenty of fuel and begins a fire. From there you mostly just need bad luck - yes the staff could be better trained, but even when they do summon professionals the firefighters don't arrive in time to tackle it while it's still small, the then-unknown trench effect allows the hot gases to pool and initiate flash over suddenly, a bunch of people die.
My suspicion is that alcohol is mind-altering in ways smoking is not, and has a large effect on social interactions in business and romance and coping with the drudgery of daily life.
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.
Sounds like you're using the wrong fuel. If we'd switched all the petrol cars over to propane instead of having "scrappage schemes" to sell people new "cleaner greener diesels" - and you see how that worked out - then we'd have pristine fresh air in our cities now.
Second hand smoke is a large (almost overwhelming) factor in SIDS. Also for people who don't smoke, it smells f--king disgusting. Nobody wants to deal with that in their life.
> 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.
Isn't the impetus on the makers of this bill to show there is more than 50% support for this.
I'm not a fan of smoking but this isn't the governments job imo. Not to mention the odd precedent of do what I say not as I do, with different laws for different generations.
I'm a non smoking Brit and figure maybe give it a go and see how it goes down?
Perhaps let young people who deeply want to smoke apply for some sort of smoking pass? You could do similar for other problem drugs too maybe. A lot of addictive drugs don't do much harm if prescribed - the NHS gave some fentanyl to help chill out which was good - but having illegal dealers causes no end of problems.
>> the government isn't a magical force that can impose its will on the people arbitrarily
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.
They appear to have taken a specific reference to "the (UK (implied by context)) government" as an arbitrary generic reference to any government on the planet.
People used to be able to smoke in pubs. But I agree it wasn't quite so culturally foundational.
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.
It makes sense to me, we're talking about a highly addictive psychoactive substance. It's much harder to get out of addiction than not get addicted in the first place, and people born after 2008 did not have a legal way to get addicted yet. That's exactly how I'd approach having a transition period to not cause unnecessary suffering in the process.
But nevermind culturally foundational, if you take away drinking at pubs then they're not pubs, it's immediately more of an impact, and more of an effect on local economies, small businesses, etc. too.
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.
Yeah, except for alcohol all the other drugs are heavily controlled (contrary to the medical or scientific evidence). Tobacco doesn't offer any benefits*
*yeah, I struggle to find significant benefits of alcohol, but there are some. There's nothing that would be beneficial in smoking.
From the government's perspective, this may (or may not) be silly.
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 there is a reasonable argument to be made that they're a different degree of societal problem. I think there's quite a few people who drink on special occasions, but not every week or even every month (I'm one of them).
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.
Smoking may be a burden on the healthcare system, but the effects of alcohol are a burden to everyone due to the resulting erratic and often directly destructive behavior.
Being a burden on the healthcare system in a country that has nationalised healthcare is being a burden on everyone through increased taxes and reduced spending in areas the money could be more useful.
Those erratic behaviours you talk about are generally illegal in most countries as well with drink driving, public intoxication, assault laws etc.
Drinking does have some positives as well, pubs are one of the few third spaces we have remaining. I know there are alternatives, but there are people who won't socialise in a cafe or a book club, but will go to the pub to see the regulars. Considering lots of Western countries have loneliness epidemics I think there'd be a downside to removing that option.
Drinking does seem to lubricate social situations, weed can help with pain etc. The only upside from smoking for the individual as far as I can tell is that it fixes the problem it created from you being addicted to it i.e. you get calmer when you get your fix.
Don't forget gambling. Though given that the gambling lobby were the only donor's to Starmer's leadership campaign that out-donated the pro-Israel lobbyists, I wouldn't bet on them doing something about it. Pun intended.
Edit: just realised I posted under the wrong comment. Doh.
>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.
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.
> Why does everyone on HN seem to have a hate boner for alcohol? The main problem there is car culture, not the alcohol.
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.
As with the cars, those are not alcohol issues, they are violence issues. Whether a drunk person turns to saccharine displays of affection or destructive acts of violence is likely driven by cultural norms and the underlying conditions of their lives.[0] Blaming alcohol for violence is akin to blaming the internet for increases in fraud.
Globally, 38% of violent deaths are alcohol-related81% of male perpetrators of intimate partner violence in England and Wales test positive for alcohol at arrest
Perhaps. The viability of that aside, I would rather attempt to create that world with things like education rather than the government mandating it. That tends not to work out as intended.
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.
Second-hand smoke does affect people around you. It is how people get addicted to nicotine. It is how new smokers are created.
And there are some people who are more sensitive to temporary exposure to smoke (and pollution in general) than others.
That is why smoking tends to be is banned around hospitals and day care centers — because those are places where you will find those people.
My father was one of them, after he had got his larynx removed for throat cancer after having smoked for decades. He could not suffer being subjected to even small amounts of second-hand smoke again because then the breathing hole in his throat would get irritated, fill up with mucus and have to be cleaned with a suction device.
And if you drink alcohol next to me, it does not make my clothes and my hair stink so much afterwards that I will want to wash my hair and change my clothes before going to bed.
If you just ignore alcohol fueled violence, birth defects, deaths from drivers hitting people and cars and the emotional health toll to others from dealing with an alcoholic, sure.
iirc alcohol is the drug with the highest amount of 3rd party harm due to the high number of people beating their spouse, children and sometimes random strangers under the influence. (+ 3rd party property, car crashes, ...)
Keep in mind this was evaluated with current laws, which bans most kinds of indoor-smoking.
Still a good idea to ban cigarettes and force people to consume their nicotine in healthier ways.
That is, until that person gets behind the wheel or on a (motor)bike and impacts you - and with that, your health - directly.
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.
> That is, until that person gets behind the wheel or on a (motor)bike and impacts you - and with that, your health - directly.
Which is something weirdly North American - it's insane how okay USians are with drinking and driving considering how Puritanical they are about drinking generally.
Are they? I have not experienced this myself. The Americans I met seemed to have the same position towards DUI as the north-western and northern Europeans I know: it is a bad idea which leads to needless accidents, injuries and death. Being a north-western European living in northern Europe I know far more of the latter two than I know Americans but, having visited the country many times for business and a few times for pleasure (north, south, east and west) I haven't met anyone who considered it 'OK' to drink and drive even though I did meet a few who did so anyway. The same is true for the Europeans I mentioned, some do get behind the wheel while they know they shouldn't.
I say this as someone who quite enjoys his drink–you haven't seen a hardcore drinking culture until you've dodged multiple projectile vomiters in SoHo at like 5PM on a random Tuesday.
I'm a bit late responding on my own sub-thread, but if you haven't seen these photos before, this is roughly what every city centre in the UK looks like after dark. https://www.maciejdakowicz.com/cardiff-after-dark/
Not Havant, though I was there to 18 and would've only had the independence to examine the nightlife for the two years in which I was doing my A-levels; not Aberystwyth as a university student, nor Plymouth city in my industrial year even though I lived here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Capitol+Students+Central+P...
Likewise, Cambridge was far too genteel for that, when I lived there.
Sheffield managed one night that would've fitted in with those pictures. When my partner and I walked past the football stadium as everyone was leaving.
There’s still a difference, surely? Drinking alcohol can lead to drunk driving and it can lead to abuse. Thankfully in the vast majority of instances it doesn’t.
Second hand smoke, however, inflicts damage the moment it’s inhaled.
I'm not saying there's no difference. I just don't that difference is as pronounced as some people think, and I don't think it excuses the apparent double standard.
Brief Googling also suggests that second-hand smoke affects at least similar levels of people as drunk driving, if not more - to say nothing of e.g. domestic violence.
Not to mention, there are already various laws designed to mitigate the effects of second-hand smoke, such as not smoking indoors or in cars with children.
Overall, I am just not convinced that it's necessary to focus so much more on cigarettes over other drugs.
> there are already various laws designed to mitigate the effects of second-hand smoke
And there are already various laws designed to prevent drunk driving and drunk domestic abuse.
I think the broader picture here is a simple one: drinking alcohol is more societally acceptable than smoking. A government is going to be reflective of its voters, “necessary” or not, a law to ban drinking would be enormously unpopular in a way a law to ban smoking would not.
> I think the broader picture here is a simple one: drinking alcohol is more societally acceptable than smoking. A government is going to be reflective of its voters, “necessary” or not, a law to ban drinking would be enormously unpopular in a way a law to ban smoking would not.
Sure, and this is why I put aside the issue of whether the government is doing the "right" thing in its position and focused on the people who it supposedly reflects - because it doesn't make sense to me that one is more acceptable than the other to an individual, and thinking so doesn't seem to reflect any sort of realistic view on alcohol and its impact on society, while holding cigarettes to a much higher standard.
There is when that person is traveling at a high rate of speed...
Look, I get that you're anti-smoking along with the rest of us but both things are bad. Drinking is bad, smoking is bad, a lot of things are bad. The question is, which of these bad things did you try out and are now stuck with? That's the real issue. Products shouldn't not be allowed to be physically addicting like that. Arguing about it on HN to a bunch of addicts is like arguing with an alcoholic on their drinking problem. It's an echo chamber or a brick wall. Someone's going to walk away with a black eye.
Is second hand smoke dangerous? Not the same way inhaling soldering fumes could be or if you ever welded, the fumes could cause damage to your lungs. It's more subtle and requires prolonged exposure.
Oh, the hysteria people get over smelling a whiff of secondhand smoke. While you walk down a street full of diesel trucks, inhaling microplastics, microwaving your food in plastic, drinking water from plastic bottles, eating processed foods with nitrates, corn sugar soaked in round-up, standing out in the sun, getting body scans and dental X-rays.
You know the only people who got lung cancer from secondhand smoke were people who worked in airplanes and bars and casinos for 20 years and were in condensed, extremely smoky environments day in and day out, right? I smoke. I understand that everything is a cumulative risk factor. The absolute crazy freak-out hysterical reaction people have to cigarette smoke versus all the things I just named is purely a product of decades of expensively paid-for indoctrination. No one in their right mind would argue that smoking doesn't cause cancer, but if you literally think you are being harmed by smelling smoke, you must surely have a problem living in this world without a filter on your face at all times, because there is a lot more poisonous shit you encounter every single day, everywhere you go - and that's if you're lucky enough not to work in a plastics factory or somewhere that makes microwave popcorn.
[edit] While I'm at it, I just want to give a shout-out to all the people I know who heat up teflon pans before cooking in them. Who would never let someone smoke in their kitchen!
> purely a product of decades of expensively paid-for indoctrination
No, it's because being around a smoker is deeply unpleasant.
I'm old enough to remember going out before the indoor smoking ban took effect. The next morning I'd step into the shower and the smell of smoke would fill the bathroom as I washed it out of my hair. I would have a sore throat. It was all absolutely disgusting and we're so much better off where we are today. I'm sorry that your vice of choice is such a gross one.
Being against things like TFA does not mean one is against things like banning indoor smoking. Just like being for alcohol doesn't mean one wants to legalize drunk driving.
> No, it's because being around a smoker is deeply unpleasant.
Being around anyone who's disrespecting your own preferences sucks. There are two useful things to do and one antisocial thing to do in that scenario.
Useful: Don't go there, or ask someone near you to be considerate.
Antisocial: Hide and wait for the government to ban people doing it, until some theoretical future day where you feel comfortable being in a public space around people who may make you uncomfortable.
I'm a very considerate smoker. I'd never smoke by someone who was bothered by it. It truly pisses me off when smokers are inconsiderate.
On the other hand, shaping other people's behavior to your liking strikes me as sociopathic. Using the government to do so strikes me as spineless. If I'm going into their happy space, to a yoga retreat or an orgy or a wedding, I have to accept that they will do lots of things I might not enjoy. The difference is that I don't have a sense of superiority because I lack their mental flaws and sociopathic addictions to whatever they believe, but they have that sense of superiority in judging mine. And only because they have safety in numbers, which makes it even more pathetic.
This is also how I feel being an all night coder. Everyone is fine with making noise during the day and waking me up, because that's "normal" and my schedule isn't. But if I feel like playing piano at 4am, that is a problem, even if the asshole next door takes out his lawnmower at 7am. This is a division between people who want to be nice to each other, and respectful, versus those who think there is a single correct way to live and that anyone deviating from it doesn't deserve equal respect.
"Live and let live" seems to have lost its currency among the hysteria of everyone who righteously disapproves of other people's behavior. Not everywhere in the world needs to be safe for someone's individual bundle of neuroses. What's unfortunate is that we can't rely on individuals respecting other individuals now, so via the government the most repressive scenario presented by the least imaginative party in each case largerly wins. Everyone who wants to ban someone else's behavior should have the opportunity to have one of their own banned as well, to understand this phenomenon. But the safety in numbers overrides this. Which is also to say that the mass of humans are conformist cowards.
Incremental change isn't a thing? Focusing on one health area, which will certainly be a massive undertaking, instead of trying to wipe out all unhealthy things at the same time?
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.
Is weed legal in the UK? Do people still smoke it?
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?
There is a big difference between weed and tobacco.
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.
That's a different in the harm, not a difference in the effectiveness of prohibition. In fact, the more addictive the substance, the less effective I would expected prohibition to be (and the more ancillary harms to result, especially from criminalisation).
That's exactly what this is. The money has moved on to pouches and vapes.
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.
My main problem with this is the "do as I say not as I do" intergenerational conflict.
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.
> 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)
I mean, that's a practical and relatively small adjustment where the far-and-away majority of the voting populous are the people who are affected by the change. Yes, if you wanted to nitpick there, you could, there is a very small injustice there, but this is completely different.
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.
See, that at least affects a big enough swath of voters that they could, if mattered to them, vote everyone involved out. This smoking ban is specifically designed to not affect a single voter.
I can't agree with this. When they become voters, if enough people of that age bracket wanted to reversed it then they could elect a party that has it in their manifesto.
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.
- ~90% of daily smokers first tried cigarettes by age 18
- ~95% had their first cigarette by age 20-21 (American Lung Association)
- 98% first smoked by age 26 (National Cancer Institute)
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
I predominantly agree with your comment, although framing the way the legal system works as just "elect a party who says they want to remove it" is fairly short sighted in my opinion.
It is much easier to pass new laws, then to remove old laws. Parties also tend to not get elected because of promises for law adjustments, its primarily based upon policy adjustments and most people aren't single issue voters, the want to smoke might be a consideration for some people but even the most diehard smokers probably have 20 other things more important on their mind when at the voting booth.
Compromise, sure. I'm an ex-smoker, we can make smoking completely illegal for all I care. Again, I just think it's absurd that a government can think it is in any way legitimate to pass a law that only affects one class of people and passes it only when that class of people have no representation in government. That is a kind of tyranny, we shouldn't pretend it's not.
> 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.
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.
As a former smoker (who quit for seven years and regrets taking it up again), and as a present-day vape user, wtf. This is a clear restriction on liberty. It may be stupid that I do it. Just like many stupid decisions (junk food included), it ought to be my right to decide how to live.
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.
Then ban McDonalds. Ban cigarettes outright for all. Give federal funding to healthy alternatives. Raise tax on sugar 200%. Alcohol 500%. Use federal funds to make cities walkable. Give police the mandate to enforce more action on violent criminals. Fund unions. Fine employers where people work longer than 8 hours per day on average. Fine employers who do not grant mandatory 5 weeks vacation per year.
This is the world where the interests of the NHS is what counts for making the rules. Many countries implement at least some of these measures, to great success.
There is something insidious about the state forcing a citizen to pay for its services, only turn around and insist that the use of said services entitles the state to further control of the citizen.
Not the quantity of food though. Deaths attributed to obesity are higher than those of smoking in recent years. Smoking rates are falling, but obesity continues to climb in the UK.
Unlike food, nicotine is not a necessity. Also calorie intake alone doesn't determine weight gain or loss. The problem of obesity is much more complex.
Governments try to address this problem through education and regulation of food. There are drugs available now to help control obesity and they're very popular, so people obviously want to avoid the condition.
I don't know why you think people should have a right to take highly addictive drugs that result in premature death. Contrary to smoker's claims, cigarettes are pure addiction and provide no benefits whatsoever to the smoker.
They already prevent advertising the sorts of foods that contribute to obesity to children, and encourage you to drink less sugary drinks by applying tax to them (though unfortunately manufacturers have responded to this by reducing choice and adding artificial sweeteners instead of selling something at a higher price that can be enjoyed once every few weeks.
I don't think any of this is unreasonable in a country that picks up the tab through both subsidised dental care and completely free-at-point-of-use healthcare.
A legislation that isn't possible to enforce is not reasonable, no.
Banning cigarettes = easy to enforce.
Banning sugar in soft drinks = easy to enforce.
Limiting how many calories you can consume = how do you propose we do that? Do we even have the technology to track what someone eats? And do we carve out exceptions for athletes?
If there was a way to cap calories without surgically inserting trackers into everybody I'm sure you'd see a lot less opposition to your idea.
Whether something is possible to enforce seems like a sliding scale. We can totally imagine a world where a calorie cap is possible to enforce. In such a world, would it be reasonable?
not could, should. i'm fully in favor of banning processed foods that fall below a threshold for calories/micronutrient ratio (and no artificial enrichment permitted)
Smokers cost less in medical care because they die of heart attack and stroke before they get old enough for age-related care, along with smoking disqualifying people from many common procedures. Plus the sin taxes they pay already bring in more revenue than their entire lifetime medical costs.
OK, so if you smoke you don't get national / socialized health care but don't have to pay the taxes that fund it either. Deal. It's enough to convince me to take up smoking.
> This is a clear restriction on liberty. ... Just like many stupid decisions (junk food included), it ought to be my right to decide how to live.
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.
There's already some pretty comprehensive bans on smoking in places where it could affect other people. I don't really encounter cigarette smoke in my day-to-day life.
> There's already some pretty comprehensive bans on smoking in places where it could affect other people.
Which I'm arguing are disregarded most of the times by most smokers. I do encounter cigarette smoke in my day-to-day, unfortunately. And unfortunately it's always the same places, mostly bars and restaurants that have outdoor spaces. Places where I'm supposed to smell food I pay for, and I end up smelling smoke instead.
> If they want to protect people they need to ban it for everybody..
Last time governments tried to force people to do something for their own sake, you saw how it ended (COVID). If people can't start smoking cigarettes, they won't get hooked up, so gradually at least regular cigarettes will be phased out. Vapes are still controversial, but as a non-smoker with a very sensitive nose, vape smoke is 10000x better than cigarette smoke. It doesn't cause me to cough, it doesn't contain harmful chemical compounds, it doesn't soil clothes nearly as much, and I can still smell food at a restaurant.
I think that a government should be able to ban murdering people but that it would very sketchy for them to ban it for some people and not others.
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.
You vill get your state mandated 1 hour of exercise and 5 servings of vegetables. You VILL eat only the state mandated bug based protein that our studies have shown to be 10% less likely of causing heart attacks than red meat. YOU VILL NOT spend more than 1 hour outside to prevent skin cancer.
If the construction industry is any indication the stuff these people mandate is lucky to have 1% at best and that's with "money motivated" numbers cooked up in academic labs funded by the same industries that benefit from the rules.
It's a restriction on liberty but not an unjustified one. I agree that it gives cigarettes a "mystique" that they do not deserve to have one generation able to smoke if they like while another generation has to go outside the law to do so.
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.
People should be able to do things that provide them with little value. Over-eating and drinking alcohol seem to be some of the UK's favourites, far more than smoking.
If I want to smoke in my own home I should be able to. Next up the government will ban reading hacker news for people born after 2012 because it incentivizes you sitting in your chair too much.
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.
Maybe I could sit here and debate the pros and cons, supposed crap about my liberties, is the age bracket the right way to go about it. But this is a good thing, there is nothing good about cigarettes no matter which way you argue it, or compare it to anything else.
Should we completely stop smoking? Yes. There is absolutely nothing about it that is good for us or anyone near those smoking.
Its not just how you life your life to the state, its for your own health and those around you. Your life will be marginally better without cigarettes.
100% agree. What else follows from this line of thinking and will people have the power and ability to protect those activities when the next one comes. Yes the slippery slope is real. Look at the encroachment of surveillance capitalism. Sociopaths take an inch they take a mile and tell you its for your own good
It's sad that the UK, which invented liberal philosophy, is increasingly accepting of paternalism. It's important that people have an inviolable personal sphere inside which they can live their lives as they see fit. That includes making decisions of which society disaproves.
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 real answer would be to ban all commercial cultivation and sales, but keep personal consumption legal. It's the multi-billion dollar tobacco industry that systematically hooks people through advertising, not the plant. Something tells me not many folks will be growing tobacco plants in their basement to get a fix.
we now have empirical evidence of where liberalism leads us: to an amoral, predatory marketplace. which profits from exploiting people who are helplessly addicted to poisons like nicotine, processed foods and alcohol. how much worse does it need to get before we go back to the drawing board?
Liberalism has led us to almost unbelievable prosperity. The fact that it has some downsides does not suggest that we have to "go back to the drawing board"
is this your argument? "the fact that they're dying as a direct result of us becoming unbelievably prosperous does not suggest anything needs to change"
Smoking is clearly harmful, but I'm not sure about laws that criminalize adults from deciding what they want to do with their own bodies. Health care costs are a factor, but I don't know about the UK but in the US these days, junk food and sodas probably incur more health care costs through obesity, than smoking.
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.
They ban buying cigarettes, not nicotine in general, correct?
In that case, I would compare it to making catalytic converters mandatory in new cars in the 1970s.
You still can pickup nicotine consumption, but with xx % less carcinogens :)
Drinking has been decided to be totally fine though, no need to ban that - probably because it's unfashionable to smoke, and the kind of people who come up with these laws find it uncouth. It will also be ridiculous in a few years when the UK inevitably decides to legalise marijuana - totally fine to smoke a joint, but don't you dare put any of that tobacco in it!
Drinking doesn’t affect others as direct as smoking does.
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.
Drinking affects others much more than smoking does, it's just that it doesn't affect random strangers. In a study of the harms of various substances, alcohol came out on top by a mile for the damage it does to the family and others close to the drinker.
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.
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.
This isn't the smoking gun you think it is though.
Of course Alcohol and Tobacco are high up on the list because they are legal. The percentage of people drinking vs percentage of people doing heroin is not even comparable.
Apparently <0.2% of people in the UK are heroin users. [0].
Apparently above 50% of people in the UK drink once a week or more [1]
What should be surprising is that 0.2% of the population results in the second highest negative impacts on society. Not that something the vast majority partake in causes the most issues, of course it does given the sheer scale of it.
Put simply, imagine if 50% of the UK did Heroin at least once a week, it would be much worse than alcohol usage.
Nobody was ever attacked on the street by a tobacco-addled stranger at 3 in the morning though. Besides, they're not banning indoor smoking, they're banning it entirely - including vaping and other nicotine products.
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:
Right. Booze is straight up naturally occurring, albeit rare. That's why you get drunk monkeys and other wildlife. The animal is like "Actually this moldy fruit is pretty good" - they did absolutely nothing to manufacture booze but here it is.
They're not banning smoking in general (which would be impossible anyway, what are they going to do, make it illegal to set something on fire and breathe it in?), they're banning nicotine products. 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’d say cocaine is the upper class drug of choice. Regardless, alcohol is every classes drug of choice. The debate over whether the government is hypocritical or not kind of ignores the reality that British voters don’t want alcohol banned. So the government isn’t going to ban it. Which is broadly what you’d want a government to do!
MDMA is a lot more acutely dangerous than nicotine, and somewhat moreso than alcohol. If you drink too much, you'll vomit, and for the most part be fine. Obviously that not always true (I'm sure everyone knows at least one person who had to have their stomach pumped in college), but for the vast majority of users, their body's natural defense against being poisoned works fine.
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.
Really in the case of tobacco, (almost) no one is going to grow it. It's a massive pain in the ass when most people are addicted to the nicotine. Synthetic nicotine in vapes are what would be black marketed these days.
It's way easier to ship as well discreetly, borderline impossible to seize in reality, which is probably one of the reason in SEA they are about to ban vaping, it's really a huge gateway to transport anything, very rarely LE is opening open and testing what the vape contains, so transporting large amount of any substances has never been easier.
Yes, I smoked for a decade. The only noticeable effect it produces after a while is providing relief from nicotine withdrawal symptoms. It does feel similar to regaining focus or calming your nerves, so smokers trick themselves into thinking that's what it actually does. Nicotine is also way, way more addictive than alcohol. I've gone months without alcohol with almost no mental effort but day 3 of quitting smoking was probably one of the most miserable and challenging of my life.
Is there proof that the positive effects are still there after you're hooked? Or are the "positive effects" at that point just a cessation of the negative effects of withdrawal?
Yes, absolutely. It's a stimulant, similar to caffeine. Just like how nearly everyone adjusts their caffeine consumption based on the situation (got to buckle down, drink an extra cup of coffee), people do the same with nicotine. It also still works as an appetite suppressant.
Now, the euphoric effects that you get at first, those very rapidly go away with tolerance. With habitual use, you probably only experience a tiny shadow of that with the first hit of the day, or a respectable replay if for whatever reason you go a couple days without (which is heightened by the cessation of withdrawal). The nausea and disorientation also go away, which is nice since otherwise it would be a problem.
Can anyone attest if young people are actually taking up cigarettes again? I was talking with a friend that teaches teenagers and she was explaining how many students that once were getting in trouble for vaping/pouches have now turned on to cigarettes. Completely boggles my mind - I thought the newer generation had a much stronger aversion to physical cigarettes.
Just from my subjective view and observation, I'd say yes. It feels like a lot more people (younger than 30 roughly) smoke more than people around my peer group (mid 30s).
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
At least in my younger brother's social circles, cigarettes are considered the inferior, but sometimes more available, good. They're hooked on nicotine via vapes, but it's sometimes easier to get a hold of cigarettes. That doesn't mean they smoke nearly as many cigarettes as we'd be used to seeing from a smoker pre-vapes, since once they can refill/buy another disposable vape they'll preferentially use those.
I do volunteer work at a youth organization in the Netherlands. Recently smoking has become a lot more popular. Nearly all kids between 18 and 25 smoke here. There is also a very clear group effect. People start smoking because others are doing it.
Australia (and the States) tried to impose ever increasing tax and restriction on smoking and over the last few years, smoking has reached critical mass, with more people smoking, cheaper smokes, and smokes becoming more available AND less regulated.
Previously a 20 pack was around $40-60 at most smoke shops, then the illegal darts started to come in, they were priced as low as $6 or $8 for the cheapest 20 pack. They become rampant and barely anyone purchased genuine smokes. In fact, these illegal smoke stores were exactly like real smoke shops, proper business, proper storefront and everything. Excluding the prices, you couldn't tell you were buying illegal products.
Why not just get your nicotine fix via one of the handful of other delivery methods which are not banned? Or just find a local black market doggie hookup, same as you would for any other illegal substance?
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.
I didn't find anything particular, but in general it should apply to anyone under the jurisdiction. I think it's illegal to drink underage in the US, even if the person is a tourist and they are allowed to drink by their own country's law.
This is good and all, but they should probably also restrict the advertising of nicotine products in this country. Coming here from the states, I was astounded that you can advertise Zyn like nicotine pouches in tube stations and around in public.
The cigarette lobbyists are not what they used to be. A pack is £15+ of mostly tax, beige green colour, and has gruesome health warning images. They "let" all that happen.
I assume all the ones who were young enough to have worked tobacco at its peak are now working for Meta, OpenAI or Flutter.
The real story may be that even despite heavy lobbying, they are trying to do something that has the potential to benefit the population, with the added benefit of reducing some of the load on health care system caused by this.
As we know, smoking can cause lots of problems, including for babies if the mother smokes during pregnancy.
Although much less harmful than smoke, nicotine is still not harmless to the cardiovascular system. If the goal is public health, it makes sense to move the needle a little further and try to keep people off nicotine entirely.
Alcohol is another story, we're not ready to remove that yet.
After alcohol, are we going to stop people from having multiple sexual partners in their lifetime? Because if public health is the goal, that would solve a lot of problems.
It is fine to attempt to improve public health, but not at the cost of giving people a life worth living.
We should ban scrolling social media for people born after a certain date and legally mandate an hour of exercise per day and eating 5 servings of vegetables. If you don't listen, one month in jail. The state has decided that since it pays for your healthcare, it will now tell you how to live your life.
There are all kinds of activities/behaviors whose costs are socialized: obesity, driving, sitting around all day/not exercising, living in suburbs, gambling, engaging in sports (broken bones cost society!). That's kind of the point of a society though - to pay for socialized costs. If the goal is to make every individual pay for the consequences of their own decisions what's the point of public healthcare or insurance in general?
I wonder what the cost/benefit analysis is for different addressable health outcomes. For example, under this justification could a government mandate a restricted calorie diet or enforce daily resistance training?
You're making my point by making sweeping deeply personal policy for people without first citing how much less dangerous vaping nicotine is vs using tobacco.
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
Then charge smokers much more for healthcare rather than collectively punishing and discriminatorily reducing the rights of a group of people arbitrarily. Individual freedom and consequences rather than prior restraint.
As the saying goes - "Alcohol is an excellent servant, but a terrible master." The same could be said for Metrics. So much is measurable these days, and we love to watch the chart go up or down. If it hasn't been measured, it doesn't exist. And the bureaucrats conjure reality with nothing but a spreadsheet and the flourish of a rubber stamp.
Are they going to continue selling cigarettes and vapes for people born before that date. I've always found the career as a prohibition smuggler a somewhat romantic notion so at some point I may be able to take it up.
> Stop doing things that hurt you !! You need to live your life like a min-max optimization for max lifespan. !! You haven't done your government mandated hour of exercise today, enjoy 30 days in prison !!
This wasn't even about that. It was about selling cigarettes to others, pretending to be a romantic rebel.
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.
You WILL get your state mandated 1 hour of exercise everyday and you will eat your state mandated five servings of vegetables. You will not go outside for more than an hour a day to prevent skin cancer. If you were born after 2010, you will eat the state mandated bug-based red meat replacement. You don't even need to stop eating meat, you just can't start.
People should have the right to make bad decisions, because with a population of millions of individuals you can not accurately decide what is a bad decision and what is just a less bad decision.
First I've heard of generational ban was in a hundred years old novel from Jack London (maybe an autobiography ? can't remember the name).
It certainly was about alcohol, maybe he mentioned tobacco as well, anyway the idea and debate certainly aren't new.
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. ?
In a few years, they'll realize that the savings from public health care now requires an an even higher amount of money poured into the police, customs and justice systems to enforce it. Because suddenly, there are these weirdos trying to sell it in dark places. Who could anticipate that?
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.
This lack of social consensus is the problem here. A national referendum would be better, as it provides a way to force people to consider the changes and decide.
I think that banning smoking in public places makes sense because you are impacting other people. I think banning things for kids makes sense because it’s a big wide world and it’s our duty to protect them. I’m not a fan of banning the things that a grown adult can do when it only affects them personally, however much I despise smoking. Since when have people decided that giving up personal liberty is fine. If you want to look 15 years older with gross teeth, horrible smell and die at 60, it’s kind of up to you.
This is insanely dumb. Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you. So if people want to do it anyway who cares. I understand the cafe and indoor space bans but not allowing anyone to do it seems stupid. I don’t smoke but UK has really gone off the deep end recently with social controls, what is the point?
Some cities have streets where internal combustion engines are banned.
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.
While I appreciate those efforts, and do not mind tobacco-free streets, I'll also note that some cities have unfiltered power plant exhaust falling on them, carried by the jet stream from other cities vast distances away, which care less about the problem. The local solution may not be the optimal solution.
When they came for the smokers, I did not care, because I was not a smoker.
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.
Kinda pointless the government looking muscular on this when the real issue has moved on anyway to vaping, access to weed etc. The industry lobbying wont come after the govt anyway so no blocks right, as they are getting profit from elsewhere
People have been smoking tobacco for 12,000 years. How about nanny states fuck off and let people do what they want with their body. I would be happy for regulation of additives that tobacco companies adulterate their products with, but I should be able to smoke any plant I want.
I defend to the death individual choice but I'm also okay if the healthcare system wants a surcharge for voluntary lifestyle choices that cause first-, second-, and third-order health problems. That a universal healthcare system exists should never be used to rationalize universal, Orwellian deprivation of rights and invasive control of what people can do with their bodies or how to live. "No" to discrimination, collective punishment, and removal of liberty, but I'm okay with costs for voluntary choices.
It's hard to say if smoking weed (blunts or the useless nonfiltration of a bong) is worse than smoking cigarettes because of the lack of filter, but I'd probably try filtered atomization (not necessarily vaping) rather than breathing in ash and tiny smoke particles that destroy lung capacity. To each, their own.
I have a slightly different take on this. Tobacco is a product that is sold by producers who know it is both highly addictive and extremely bad for their customers' health. That should be illegal. But it should not be illegal for people to consume (as long as they don't harm others via second hand smoke). The principle is simple: harming other people deliberately is wrong. (Harming yourself is merely stupid).
So I would ban the manufacture and sale of tobacco, but make it perfectly legal to grow your own. Smoke as much as you want. Just don't harm others.
I don't necessarily have a problem with it, but this is just stealth micro-pensions. Expect tobacco purchases by Gen-X'ers and Millenials to skyrocket over the next few decades.
<sarcasm>
Oh yeah, banning people who can't vote yet, genius.
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.
Smoking is debilitating, so is alcohol, drugs and gambling. Since the last >100 we see a trend to gradually restrict them, one by one, albeit inconsistently. Smoking was a casual habit in the 60s, next it was banned indoors and now before a certain age. In the (not too) distant future it might me totally banned next to its cousin, cannabis. Tldr, the decision is not surprising but expected, following the trend.
You can kind of tell when people think about only themselves or the community when they present arguments for things like smoking and vaccination.
"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!
Is taking concepts to logical extremes a good way to govern?
(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.
Natural consequence of socialized medicine. If I’m paying for your healthcare then I (and by extension the state) get a say in basically every aspect of your life.
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
If you google it, revenue is at £8 billion (Office for Budget Responsibility) and in decline, and NHS spending is at £2.6 billion in England, so the bulk of it (NHS England).
I do not have the specific info/ref to hand, but at one point some years ago, smoking brought in something of the order of nine times as much into the NHS as it spent on smoking related illnesses. I was very surprised by this.
Even so, the NHS's goals are rightly such that greatly reducing the harm done by smoking is preferred over keeping this revenue. Unlike a tobacco company that would not factor harms external to the organisation into the profit and loss calculation.
Let us look at the cancer survival rates in the US vs countries with socialized medicine. I know for a fact when the business elite of my Euro country gets cancer they fly to NY. They don't pay taxes either tho so I guess it works for them.
The other natural consequence of socialized medicine is rationing. In Canada the waiting time for treatment is often months or years[1]. That GoFundMe might give you a higher survival rate.
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.”
> He is new in post as a trading standards manager at Bolton Council in Greater Manchester but worked for 10 years on a tobacco enforcement team at nearby Rochdale Council.
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?
This is dumb. Brazil was able to extremely reduce tobacco consumption “just” with education and banning advertising.
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?
A quick Google search suggests that Brazil and the UK have similar levels of smoking in the adult population. So the UK's already succeeded in reducing smoking consumption. The aim of this legislation is to eventually eliminate it.
I completely disagree. Obviously people individually want to smoke - nicotine makes them feel good! - and there's a good chance they would vote to preserve that "right," but smoking is bad for society and we would unambiguously be better off if it didn't exist.
One of the principal jobs of government is to stand for the good of the collective against individual selfishness.
I don't think there's anything peculiarly British about that usage. It's easy to find examples of Americans doing the same thing, e.g.:
>The report, in an op-ed from commentator David Ignatius, cites a senior US official as saying that “the framework is agreed” and the parties are now “negotiating details of how it will be implemented.”
There are two separate issues here: 1. will this work (will the UK stop smoking) 2. is this something the UK government should be doing
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.
> other things (alcohol) that cause problems and are not being restricted
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.
Big difference between banning something outright and regulating a substance.
> Big difference between banning something outright and regulating a substance
One could frame this as a substance regulation for anyone under 18, with the age moving one year every year henceforth.
Thats like saying somebody is poking you with a stick while its really getting smashed by a baseball bat.
Nah - you're coping, respectfully.
what if they told you your kids would never be allowed to have a drink?
Sounds like a great way to avoid alcohol addiction, prevent drunk driving deaths, and save countless generations from being negatively impacted in one way or another by alcohol.
Prohibition doesn't work because people want to modulate their consciousness, chemically force-relax, reduce inhibitions, etc. It didn't work before, and it won't in the future. The more things are forbidden, the more taboo and attractive they become.
This banal, smiling, petty authoritarianism sickens me. Bodily autonomy trumps "common good" arguments, and where it somehow doesn't, injustice abides. Society's job isn't to crush individualism in order to create the safest and most financially efficient outcome. Shall we throw everyone in prison for their safety and protection next, and control their diet to ensure maximum healthspan and potential for participation in the labor market?
Rather than banning anything, point out at an early age that cigarettes stink, get you addicted, cost money forever, and cause health problems. Point out that alcohol makes you fat and causes heart problems and cancer. The accept that each person has the right to make a decision for themselves about what risks they're willing to accept to achieve a desired outcome, and that they have to own those consequences.
Don't want to pay for smokers' lung cancer treatment? Then only fund palliative care for smoking-related cancers. Man enough to smoke a pack a day, man enough to buy smokers' insurance. There, now we can live free.
Smokers already more than pay for their healthcare so punishing them further is silly. Not only is their lifetimehealthcare cheaper, because smoking disqualifies you from many procedures and kills most users right around retirement age before the expensive age-related care becomes common, but the sin-tax collected from smokers in most countries is larger than the average lifetime medical care cost.
It's basically taxing people for saving everybody else money.
An interesting point. So over the next ~60 years, the UK has committed itself to having to find a replacement for all the tax revenue that will be lost by eliminating tobacco products. Additionally, the number of people with longer lifespans will increase, necessitating more late-life care delivery through the NHS, which will also have to be funded.
Outcome: this will cost everyone a lot of money. Time to raise the retirement age to 80!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...
Different apples. Cessation vs never starting is completely different.
A lot of young people don't drink anymore anyway tho. It's not as extreme as it sounds.
As someone who's been sober for only 16 months, not sure how I feel about this. It is surely unrealistic.
Apples to oranges. It worked (and works) with the advent of Islam in Muslim lands.
You have conveniently left out the cons and only listed the pros. That's just a comment in bad faith.
or prohibit going to church or practicing any kind of organized religion? would yield a lot more positive than banning alcohol
Sounds good to me...
In huge agreement with you. But can it be done in a different way that doesn't create the black market problems of the prohibition era? (Do we have a better chance now with gen z's aversion to drugs/alcohol?)
Don't mistake media narratives about small percentage point swings for mass momentum. Especially when those swings are probably not even real: e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/mar/05/gen-z-binge-...
Maybe start by tracking consumption against their ID.
Tho that creates significant black market incentive.
Other option is only serving ultra light drinks (2.5% beer, cider, sangria or cocktail).
Awesome! Where can I sign?
It’s awesome to decide what your children, once they are adults, can’t do? Seems borderline psychopathic. Kinda sums up democracy in current times though.
> It’s awesome to decide what your children, once they are adults, can’t do?
You do realize that this is what basically every single law in existence does, right?
That my kids, and likely yours, once they're adults, can't drive under the influence, rob a bank, impersonate a cop, lie under oath, exercise medecine without a licence, walk downtown naked, jaywalk, evade taxes, criticize the King?
I've seen confusion about this before with people that I know.
You tell them it's against the law to drink, and they'll point out that it's restrictive and controlling. You tell them it's against the law to commit tax fraud, and they'll have no objection.
Why? I think, at least with the people that I know, it's related to what they want to be able to do. They want to be able to drink alcohol, so it feels controlling to tell them they can't. They aren't interested in committing tax fraud, so they're not bothered by that being restricted.
I think it's also because a lot of people act like laws are passed down by god, immutable.
Reminder that slavery was legal.
If you check it the other way around, you'll get consistency. Almost everyone that is against taxation is also against restrictions on consuming drink.
If you ask an addict then yeah you'll get some gibberish that enables them whether it fits into a logical paradigm or not.
The distinction here is, this law is a do as I say not as I do. Different laws for different dob ( dob not age )
Well to be fair, it's not that they can't, it's that society is telling them there will be repercussions if they're caught. You can still technically do whatever you want.
Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army.
you can but they can't. just plain hypocrisy.
I don't think this law is getting voted into existence by smokers, though.
Why would someone be pro-tobacco without a financial motive? What’s your angle on pushing this crap?
People have been using tobacco for many thousands of years. if they want to use it knowing full well the consequences, they should be able to. Unless we also ban things like skydiving, rock climbing, and fast cars and motorcycles, it makes no sense to me.
Why isn't prohibiting something known to cause harm a good thing? Plus, smoking doesn't just harm the individual doing it, its harm extends to those in the immediate (and sometimes not so immediate) vicinity, as well as the environment. There is literally zero good to gain from it.
If future generations want to smoke, they can change the law as easily as yours passed it.
Running government budgets further and further into deficit, believing that, as a result, your children will, some day, be in a stronger financial position to repay the resulting debt that, until that day, continues to grow at an ever-increasing rate?
That seems psychopathic.
Given the population pyramid, it would be impossible for them to change the law until they are well into old age.
You both have good points.
That's not how politics works, and you probably know it. "Easily passing laws" is not a matter of voting demographics but of political power, and any thinking person knows political power usually does not belong to younger voters.
I'd probably start learning how to homebrew beer.
But "they" aren't. So your point is irrelevant.
I’m having a hard time coming up with a better way. Simply banning all manufacturing and import is not going to work when it’s heavily addictive. In the case of alcohol, quitting cold can kill you.
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.
In the UK you can legally serve your 6 yo alcohol in your own or your friend's house.
What's heavily restricted is the sale and consumption in most public spaces.
If they wanted to ban cigarettes, they should have banned cigarettes. The whole "let's pass a law that only affects people who can't vote" strategy applied here is tyranical.
It’s the perfect way to phase it in. In ~80 years nobody will be able to smoke, but you never took the right away from someone that already had it.
A huge win for society
That doesn't sound like a win to me, it sounds ultra authoritarian and restrictive. Prohibition has never cured us of a drug problem and tobacco is no different. You think jailing someone for decades for selling tobacco should be a thing? Because that is what such a policy will do.
I think making a society more healthy should be a goal.
You already can’t legally do a lot of things that appear to only be about yourself because society as a whole said it’s not good for everyone. You can’t buy cocaine. You can’t commit suicide (it’s illegal almost everywhere) . You can’t ride a motorbike without a helmet, or drive a car without a seatbelt. You can’t even build a house without a smoke detector or remove the airbags from your own car.
To some degree, if you want to, go buy 100 acres in the middle of nowhere and go nuts. Or move to a country that doesn’t care about all those things.
If you want to be part of a modern clan, it’s not helpful to do things that indirectly hurts everyone, even if on the surface it only impacts you and your body.
If you want all the benefits of a modern society, it asks you to not be a net negative. This is 10x important in countries with universal healthcare, ie all but one.
The US did the same thing with cockfighting. It was already illegal in all the states, but they passed a federal law binding on all states and territories to stop Puerto Ricans (who had no such law against it), who have no meaningful federal representation.
>The US did the same thing with cockfighting.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
No, but my point is this argument isn't really consistently applied. The excuse about a law made specifically to apply against people that can't vote is quite popular and accepted. The cockfighting law was cheered by most the mainland US, while Puerto Rico desperately fought against it, though they weren't able to get cert in SCOTUS to challenge it.
There was never really much of any concern of "wait, Puerto Rico has no representation in the law that was essentially drafted to target specifically them." All these people claiming to not support the smoking laws on this kind of basis were nowhere to be found. The law passed like a thief in the night.
I'll happily endorse the idea that double standards and hypocrisy are the true evil if that's what you're getting at.
That seems like worth endorsing, along with the notion of disgust for legislating grown non-convicted adults without any representation.
Alcohol is quite different to cigarettes. It's fun and part of the culture - most people drink and the country is full of pubs and restaurants serving it. You couldn't ban it without most of the country, including me, objecting.
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.
If you look at the US about 50% have ever smoked some form of tobacco at least once. Only 11-15% currently do.
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.
They seem pretty popular in my neck of the woods.
I think it is also part of a trend. More and more control over people's lives, more and more bans.
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.
I see smoking as a separate category owing to the existence of second hand smoke. Smoking in a room with other people adversely affects those people. I think government is the correct body to be intervening in that scenario.
Smoking is already banned in public spaces and workplaces. It's pretty rare to be in a room with someone smoking unless they're friends or family.
No indoor smoking makes a major difference, but there still are enough semi-stationary semi-close-up situations where smokers can be still rather annoying, e.g. outdoor seating in cafes and restaurants, popular lunch break spots in parks and plazas, public transport stops, next-door neighbours… And even if you manage to position yourself upwind of all pre-existing smokers, there's no guarantee that a few minutes later somebody upwind of you suddenly won't light up…
I think health costs are the bigger issue
Yes, this is one of the reasons there is resistance to socialized health care. People view it as opening the door to the government controlling what they due due to health care costs.
Sure, I dislike smoking, I really don't drink that much either.
But then it leads to questions such as; What about birth defects? What about extreme sports(risk of permanent injury)?
There was a scandal in Canada recently about veterans asking for medical care and being push to assisted suicide: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/veterans-maid-rcmp-investig... >MacAulay walked the committee through what his department knew, thus far, saying the first case that came to light occurred last summer where the caseworker repeatedly pushed the notion of MAID to an unnamed veteran who had called seeking help with post-traumatic stress.
IMO they should just charge a premium for smoking that about covers the expense overall
Solving it with money doesn't really solve it unless there's "real" competition.
Look at automotive insurance points systems. People have to buy it so the sellers lean on the legislatures and before you know it a ticket costs the same points and screws you out of just as much money as an actual accident.
That seems appropriate. A small fraction of people cause most of the losses, they should pay more.
>That seems appropriate. A small fraction of people cause most of the losses, they should pay more.
Surely that was a satirical comment and was meant to be an illustrative example of exactly the sort of mindset that runs political cover for a system as it pivots from providing enough value to become entrenched to using that entrenched position to behave in an extractive manner.
In my state if grandma gets pulled over for an out of date inspection sticker it's the same number of points as actually causing an accident. Someone is being fleeced.
I have zero faith that letting the government choose at the behest of industry who ought to pay more for healthcare that it wouldn't devolve into the same exact sort of exercise in finding a reason to charge everyone more.
I’ve never seen having an expired tag be a points violation, that seems very wrong. IME it’s only ever moving violations that impact safety. For that, higher rates are absolutely appropriate.
Safety inspection. It's a moving violation in this state (of course it wasn't initially, frogs are best boiled slow). That's the magic of it. Frame it as a "safety" issue and everyone who can't think critically about how that sausage might be made will knee jerk approve.
If I was an auto insurer, I would want to know that my policy holders were properly maintaining their vehicles. I would also have a strong interest in ensuring that non-policy holders did the same.
And as a driver, I certainly want everyone around me to be required to properly maintain their cars.
I'm not gonna let the goal posts move here. That still doesn't make it a moving violation on par with driving like a dick and/or causing an accident.
What you're saying seems to make sense on face value but in reality letting insurance leverage safety inspections is just a politically less thorny wealth proxy. The inspections themselves don't provide all that much value (IMO this is because of how comprehensive they are, 90/10 rule and all that) and multiple states have ended their programs because they don't actually provide meaningful improvement for the money.
Regardless, even if there is somme hand wavy justification for it that some people agree with, it's flawed to the point it's probably not something we want to do with medical because it would make insurance unaffordable for so many people on flimsy at best pretexts.
In the UK taxes on tobacco earn more than the (socialised) healthcare financial cost of smoking. So this argument is a fallacy.
I don’t think the argument as a whole is a fallacy, it’s true that the exact cost to the NHS is more than covered by tax, but most estimates of wider cost to the economy (e.g. lost productivity, disability benefits, etc) is higher. https://fullfact.org/health/farage-smoking-revenue-nhs/
It's equally a fallacious argument to try to fit "cost to the economy", whatever that means, to the healthcare cost (usually this is done to inflate costs to fit the narrative). By that logic, ban everything and allow only what allows individuals to maximise their productive labour... what a nightmare.
Drinking in a room adversely affects those people.
[dead]
That's not a separate category, that's the general principle in a free society: There is a limit to "doing what you want" when it impacts others/imposes on them.
That's why smoking is already heavily regulated in order to limit and minimise the impact that your choice has on others.
I think you could make the same argument about alcohol and drugs (road fatalities + some absurd number of convicted criminals were high/drunk when perpetrating the crime) - I’m not taking a side either way but I don’t think smoking is unique in terms of harm to society there besides the user.
The same argument is made and accepted about alcohol: You can drink as much as you want but you cannot put others in danger by drink driving.
You can smoke as much as you want but smoking in public places, especially indoor, is banned not to impose your health choices on others.
This is how liberty works in a free society as mentioned in my previous comment.
Banning smoking altogether, on the other hand, is deciding for you and exactly what the "nanny state" refers to.
On reddit, not so long ago, they were inventing interesting theories about how seat belt laws were justified because without seat belts people would be ejected from cars and kill by standards when their flying carcasses cannonballed through them.
The claim that "it impacts others" is, at very minimum, exaggerated, but just as often completely fabricated out of pseudoscience and absurd movie plots.
Smoking is heavily regulated because there was a resurgence of teetotaling in the late 20th century.
Remember when seat belt laws came out in the United States, they (at least in the states I was in) vehemently promised up and down that it would always be a secondary offense and never would be allowed to become a reason to pull you over?
It impacts first responders. Not only is it bad to respond to an accident with a fatality, it's worse if you can see the would've likely been fine had they worn a seat belt.
In sweden it's forbidden to smoke at public transport stops. Nobody cares though so you often have to choose between cancer or getting soaked.
I agree that having other people smoking nearby can be unpleasant, but you might find some comfort in Sir Richard Doll's opinion on second hand smoke - that the risks were politically and publicly exaggerated beyond what the epidemiological evidence clearly supported.
Personally - aside from the smell - I have no concerns about people smoking near me outdoors or even in very well ventilated areas. I understand though that for some people (such as asthmatics) it can be a real problem that goes beyond simply being unpleasant.
in the UK you cannot smoke on public transport or inside buildings, and this is strictly adhered to.
In fact one of the most important fire disasters in England, the Kings Cross fire started because nicotine addicts used to light up on their way out of the tube (which had already prohibited smoking, it's kinda crazy to imagine people in the 1970s used to smoke on the fucking underground railway, deep under the ground where you are unavoidably breathing the same air as everybody else)
Somebody probably drops a spent match, it's still smouldering and it drops inside the escalator where it finds plenty of fuel and begins a fire. From there you mostly just need bad luck - yes the staff could be better trained, but even when they do summon professionals the firefighters don't arrive in time to tackle it while it's still small, the then-unknown trench effect allows the hot gases to pool and initiate flash over suddenly, a bunch of people die.
My suspicion is that alcohol is mind-altering in ways smoking is not, and has a large effect on social interactions in business and romance and coping with the drudgery of daily life.
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.
Taking away smoking still solves the secondhand smoke issue.
Not the second-hand vape issue though.
Those of us who don't smoke or vape can smell that shit a couple of hundred metres away.
Those of us who don't drive can smell the exhaust a couple hundred meters away, too.
Sounds like you're using the wrong fuel. If we'd switched all the petrol cars over to propane instead of having "scrappage schemes" to sell people new "cleaner greener diesels" - and you see how that worked out - then we'd have pristine fresh air in our cities now.
But that doesn't sell nearly enough debt.
You should have smelled the bathroom here an hour ago. They ought to ban chipotle for the same reason. Secondhand chipotle is the worst.
> chipotle
Have you considered just eating food?
Has everybody in the world considered just not vaping?
Like secondhand vapor, we can't control other people's secondhand chipotle unless we ban chipotle.
And since I don't like the smell, we've got to ban both.
Secondhand smoke is such a small effect with current levels of smoking and smoking laws that it is hard to even discern data about it.
Second hand smoke is a large (almost overwhelming) factor in SIDS. Also for people who don't smoke, it smells f--king disgusting. Nobody wants to deal with that in their life.
Citation needed
Americans tried to ban alcohol in the 20s, ended up propping up the organised crime.
The they later enacted the War on Drugs. They still pump billions into cartels and the federal forces.
> 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.
Isn't the impetus on the makers of this bill to show there is more than 50% support for this.
I'm not a fan of smoking but this isn't the governments job imo. Not to mention the odd precedent of do what I say not as I do, with different laws for different generations.
The Yougov poll I found has:
>Would you support or oppose a law banning anyone born after 2008 from ever buying cigarettes or tobacco products?
>Strongly support 34% Somewhat support 23%
>Somewhat oppose 16% Strongly oppose 12% (https://yougov.com/en-gb/daily-results/20221214-abbaa-1)
I'm a non smoking Brit and figure maybe give it a go and see how it goes down?
Perhaps let young people who deeply want to smoke apply for some sort of smoking pass? You could do similar for other problem drugs too maybe. A lot of addictive drugs don't do much harm if prescribed - the NHS gave some fentanyl to help chill out which was good - but having illegal dealers causes no end of problems.
>> the government isn't a magical force that can impose its will on the people arbitrarily
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.
This seems really out of context
They appear to have taken a specific reference to "the (UK (implied by context)) government" as an arbitrary generic reference to any government on the planet.
Is it possible to buy nicotine in Vietnam today? Is it de jure illegal but de facto widely available? Did everyone switch from cigarettes to vapes?
Cigarettes are not incorporated into the UK culture the way alcohol is. Drinking at a pub is sacred to them.
People used to be able to smoke in pubs. But I agree it wasn't quite so culturally foundational.
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.
It makes sense to me, we're talking about a highly addictive psychoactive substance. It's much harder to get out of addiction than not get addicted in the first place, and people born after 2008 did not have a legal way to get addicted yet. That's exactly how I'd approach having a transition period to not cause unnecessary suffering in the process.
But nevermind culturally foundational, if you take away drinking at pubs then they're not pubs, it's immediately more of an impact, and more of an effect on local economies, small businesses, etc. too.
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.
Re 2 only:
Yeah, except for alcohol all the other drugs are heavily controlled (contrary to the medical or scientific evidence). Tobacco doesn't offer any benefits*
*yeah, I struggle to find significant benefits of alcohol, but there are some. There's nothing that would be beneficial in smoking.
You seem to misunderstand the concept of liberal democracy.
From the government's perspective, this may (or may not) be silly.
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 there is a reasonable argument to be made that they're a different degree of societal problem. I think there's quite a few people who drink on special occasions, but not every week or even every month (I'm one of them).
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.
Smoking may be a burden on the healthcare system, but the effects of alcohol are a burden to everyone due to the resulting erratic and often directly destructive behavior.
Being a burden on the healthcare system in a country that has nationalised healthcare is being a burden on everyone through increased taxes and reduced spending in areas the money could be more useful.
Those erratic behaviours you talk about are generally illegal in most countries as well with drink driving, public intoxication, assault laws etc.
Drinking does have some positives as well, pubs are one of the few third spaces we have remaining. I know there are alternatives, but there are people who won't socialise in a cafe or a book club, but will go to the pub to see the regulars. Considering lots of Western countries have loneliness epidemics I think there'd be a downside to removing that option.
Drinking does seem to lubricate social situations, weed can help with pain etc. The only upside from smoking for the individual as far as I can tell is that it fixes the problem it created from you being addicted to it i.e. you get calmer when you get your fix.
A minority of people who drink are addicted to alcohol.
Basically everyone who smokes/etc is addicted to nicotine.
They aren't the same at all.
Don't forget gambling. Though given that the gambling lobby were the only donor's to Starmer's leadership campaign that out-donated the pro-Israel lobbyists, I wouldn't bet on them doing something about it. Pun intended.
Edit: just realised I posted under the wrong comment. Doh.
>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.
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.
> Why does everyone on HN seem to have a hate boner for alcohol? The main problem there is car culture, not the alcohol.
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.
As with the cars, those are not alcohol issues, they are violence issues. Whether a drunk person turns to saccharine displays of affection or destructive acts of violence is likely driven by cultural norms and the underlying conditions of their lives.[0] Blaming alcohol for violence is akin to blaming the internet for increases in fraud.
[0] https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483331096.n184
Globally, 38% of violent deaths are alcohol-related 81% of male perpetrators of intimate partner violence in England and Wales test positive for alcohol at arrest
https://worldmetrics.org/alcohol-violence-statistics/
Sure, maybe, arguably. Does it matter though? A world without smoking is still better than a world with smoking, right?
And a world where the government tells you what to eat, what to drink, and how much to exercise under penalty of jail is the best of all worlds!
Perhaps. The viability of that aside, I would rather attempt to create that world with things like education rather than the government mandating it. That tends not to work out as intended.
A world without hypocrisy would be better still.
[dead]
We know the dangers of second hand smoke. Someone drinking near you does not impact your health.
With all due respect, this is completely wrong.
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.
Second-hand smoke does affect people around you. It is how people get addicted to nicotine. It is how new smokers are created.
And there are some people who are more sensitive to temporary exposure to smoke (and pollution in general) than others. That is why smoking tends to be is banned around hospitals and day care centers — because those are places where you will find those people. My father was one of them, after he had got his larynx removed for throat cancer after having smoked for decades. He could not suffer being subjected to even small amounts of second-hand smoke again because then the breathing hole in his throat would get irritated, fill up with mucus and have to be cleaned with a suction device.
And if you drink alcohol next to me, it does not make my clothes and my hair stink so much afterwards that I will want to wash my hair and change my clothes before going to bed.
No, but the person drinking next to you can suddenly decide you gave them a bad look and decide to pick a fight.
Why are you replying as if I denied second hand smoke harms people? I very clearly said it did.
If you just ignore alcohol fueled violence, birth defects, deaths from drivers hitting people and cars and the emotional health toll to others from dealing with an alcoholic, sure.
iirc alcohol is the drug with the highest amount of 3rd party harm due to the high number of people beating their spouse, children and sometimes random strangers under the influence. (+ 3rd party property, car crashes, ...) Keep in mind this was evaluated with current laws, which bans most kinds of indoor-smoking.
Still a good idea to ban cigarettes and force people to consume their nicotine in healthier ways.
I know at least one hacker news reader who didn't grow up with an alcoholic parent.
Congratulations!
That is, until that person gets behind the wheel or on a (motor)bike and impacts you - and with that, your health - directly.
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.
> That is, until that person gets behind the wheel or on a (motor)bike and impacts you - and with that, your health - directly.
Which is something weirdly North American - it's insane how okay USians are with drinking and driving considering how Puritanical they are about drinking generally.
Are they? I have not experienced this myself. The Americans I met seemed to have the same position towards DUI as the north-western and northern Europeans I know: it is a bad idea which leads to needless accidents, injuries and death. Being a north-western European living in northern Europe I know far more of the latter two than I know Americans but, having visited the country many times for business and a few times for pleasure (north, south, east and west) I haven't met anyone who considered it 'OK' to drink and drive even though I did meet a few who did so anyway. The same is true for the Europeans I mentioned, some do get behind the wheel while they know they shouldn't.
You've probably never been out on a Friday night in the Uk.
This comment doesn't deserve the downvotes, it's a very valid point.
Is it really that bad? Is there something I can read to learn more?
> Is it really that bad?
I say this as someone who quite enjoys his drink–you haven't seen a hardcore drinking culture until you've dodged multiple projectile vomiters in SoHo at like 5PM on a random Tuesday.
I somehow managed to avoid experiencing this despite living in the UK up to the age of 34.
I'm a bit late responding on my own sub-thread, but if you haven't seen these photos before, this is roughly what every city centre in the UK looks like after dark. https://www.maciejdakowicz.com/cardiff-after-dark/
Not Havant, though I was there to 18 and would've only had the independence to examine the nightlife for the two years in which I was doing my A-levels; not Aberystwyth as a university student, nor Plymouth city in my industrial year even though I lived here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Capitol+Students+Central+P...
Likewise, Cambridge was far too genteel for that, when I lived there.
Sheffield managed one night that would've fitted in with those pictures. When my partner and I walked past the football stadium as everyone was leaving.
Grow up with an alcoholic parent then get back to us
It doesn't? That should be good news for victims of drunk driving, and the families of abusive drunks.
There’s still a difference, surely? Drinking alcohol can lead to drunk driving and it can lead to abuse. Thankfully in the vast majority of instances it doesn’t.
Second hand smoke, however, inflicts damage the moment it’s inhaled.
I'm not saying there's no difference. I just don't that difference is as pronounced as some people think, and I don't think it excuses the apparent double standard.
Brief Googling also suggests that second-hand smoke affects at least similar levels of people as drunk driving, if not more - to say nothing of e.g. domestic violence.
Not to mention, there are already various laws designed to mitigate the effects of second-hand smoke, such as not smoking indoors or in cars with children.
Overall, I am just not convinced that it's necessary to focus so much more on cigarettes over other drugs.
> there are already various laws designed to mitigate the effects of second-hand smoke
And there are already various laws designed to prevent drunk driving and drunk domestic abuse.
I think the broader picture here is a simple one: drinking alcohol is more societally acceptable than smoking. A government is going to be reflective of its voters, “necessary” or not, a law to ban drinking would be enormously unpopular in a way a law to ban smoking would not.
> I think the broader picture here is a simple one: drinking alcohol is more societally acceptable than smoking. A government is going to be reflective of its voters, “necessary” or not, a law to ban drinking would be enormously unpopular in a way a law to ban smoking would not.
Sure, and this is why I put aside the issue of whether the government is doing the "right" thing in its position and focused on the people who it supposedly reflects - because it doesn't make sense to me that one is more acceptable than the other to an individual, and thinking so doesn't seem to reflect any sort of realistic view on alcohol and its impact on society, while holding cigarettes to a much higher standard.
Same amount of damage done to your liver from that beer…
There's no such thing as second hand liver damage from someone else drinking beer
There is when that person is traveling at a high rate of speed...
Look, I get that you're anti-smoking along with the rest of us but both things are bad. Drinking is bad, smoking is bad, a lot of things are bad. The question is, which of these bad things did you try out and are now stuck with? That's the real issue. Products shouldn't not be allowed to be physically addicting like that. Arguing about it on HN to a bunch of addicts is like arguing with an alcoholic on their drinking problem. It's an echo chamber or a brick wall. Someone's going to walk away with a black eye.
Is second hand smoke dangerous? Not the same way inhaling soldering fumes could be or if you ever welded, the fumes could cause damage to your lungs. It's more subtle and requires prolonged exposure.
There is, however, absolutely such a thing as being glassed and sustaining head injuries from someone else drinking beer.
Shows up consistently in A&E Hospital records, reportedly enough to identify weekends and phases of the moon.
Oh, the hysteria people get over smelling a whiff of secondhand smoke. While you walk down a street full of diesel trucks, inhaling microplastics, microwaving your food in plastic, drinking water from plastic bottles, eating processed foods with nitrates, corn sugar soaked in round-up, standing out in the sun, getting body scans and dental X-rays.
You know the only people who got lung cancer from secondhand smoke were people who worked in airplanes and bars and casinos for 20 years and were in condensed, extremely smoky environments day in and day out, right? I smoke. I understand that everything is a cumulative risk factor. The absolute crazy freak-out hysterical reaction people have to cigarette smoke versus all the things I just named is purely a product of decades of expensively paid-for indoctrination. No one in their right mind would argue that smoking doesn't cause cancer, but if you literally think you are being harmed by smelling smoke, you must surely have a problem living in this world without a filter on your face at all times, because there is a lot more poisonous shit you encounter every single day, everywhere you go - and that's if you're lucky enough not to work in a plastics factory or somewhere that makes microwave popcorn.
[edit] While I'm at it, I just want to give a shout-out to all the people I know who heat up teflon pans before cooking in them. Who would never let someone smoke in their kitchen!
> purely a product of decades of expensively paid-for indoctrination
No, it's because being around a smoker is deeply unpleasant.
I'm old enough to remember going out before the indoor smoking ban took effect. The next morning I'd step into the shower and the smell of smoke would fill the bathroom as I washed it out of my hair. I would have a sore throat. It was all absolutely disgusting and we're so much better off where we are today. I'm sorry that your vice of choice is such a gross one.
Being around cars is deeply unpleasant. And the second-hand smoke they put off is very unhealthy to breathe in.
Being against things like TFA does not mean one is against things like banning indoor smoking. Just like being for alcohol doesn't mean one wants to legalize drunk driving.
> No, it's because being around a smoker is deeply unpleasant.
Being around drinkers isn't exactly a picnic :)
Being around anyone who's disrespecting your own preferences sucks. There are two useful things to do and one antisocial thing to do in that scenario.
Useful: Don't go there, or ask someone near you to be considerate.
Antisocial: Hide and wait for the government to ban people doing it, until some theoretical future day where you feel comfortable being in a public space around people who may make you uncomfortable.
I'm a very considerate smoker. I'd never smoke by someone who was bothered by it. It truly pisses me off when smokers are inconsiderate.
On the other hand, shaping other people's behavior to your liking strikes me as sociopathic. Using the government to do so strikes me as spineless. If I'm going into their happy space, to a yoga retreat or an orgy or a wedding, I have to accept that they will do lots of things I might not enjoy. The difference is that I don't have a sense of superiority because I lack their mental flaws and sociopathic addictions to whatever they believe, but they have that sense of superiority in judging mine. And only because they have safety in numbers, which makes it even more pathetic.
This is also how I feel being an all night coder. Everyone is fine with making noise during the day and waking me up, because that's "normal" and my schedule isn't. But if I feel like playing piano at 4am, that is a problem, even if the asshole next door takes out his lawnmower at 7am. This is a division between people who want to be nice to each other, and respectful, versus those who think there is a single correct way to live and that anyone deviating from it doesn't deserve equal respect.
"Live and let live" seems to have lost its currency among the hysteria of everyone who righteously disapproves of other people's behavior. Not everywhere in the world needs to be safe for someone's individual bundle of neuroses. What's unfortunate is that we can't rely on individuals respecting other individuals now, so via the government the most repressive scenario presented by the least imaginative party in each case largerly wins. Everyone who wants to ban someone else's behavior should have the opportunity to have one of their own banned as well, to understand this phenomenon. But the safety in numbers overrides this. Which is also to say that the mass of humans are conformist cowards.
> Someone drinking near you does not impact your health.
Hah, alcoholics have done more damage to my life than a smoker could ever dream of.
Incremental change isn't a thing? Focusing on one health area, which will certainly be a massive undertaking, instead of trying to wipe out all unhealthy things at the same time?
> 1. will this work (will the UK stop smoking)
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.
Prohibition did fail and US had to revert ban on alcohol.
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.
A smoking ban could easily be enforced by allowing anyone bothered by secondhand smoke to report it.
Is weed legal in the UK? Do people still smoke it?
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?
There is a big difference between weed and tobacco.
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.
That's a different in the harm, not a difference in the effectiveness of prohibition. In fact, the more addictive the substance, the less effective I would expected prohibition to be (and the more ancillary harms to result, especially from criminalisation).
That's exactly what this is. The money has moved on to pouches and vapes.
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.
Right, because it totally worked with drugs. People just don't use them anymore. Weed is impossible to come by nowadays.
My main problem with this is the "do as I say not as I do" intergenerational conflict.
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.
> 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)
I mean, that's a practical and relatively small adjustment where the far-and-away majority of the voting populous are the people who are affected by the change. Yes, if you wanted to nitpick there, you could, there is a very small injustice there, but this is completely different.
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.
See, that at least affects a big enough swath of voters that they could, if mattered to them, vote everyone involved out. This smoking ban is specifically designed to not affect a single voter.
I can't agree with this. When they become voters, if enough people of that age bracket wanted to reversed it then they could elect a party that has it in their manifesto.
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
I predominantly agree with your comment, although framing the way the legal system works as just "elect a party who says they want to remove it" is fairly short sighted in my opinion.
It is much easier to pass new laws, then to remove old laws. Parties also tend to not get elected because of promises for law adjustments, its primarily based upon policy adjustments and most people aren't single issue voters, the want to smoke might be a consideration for some people but even the most diehard smokers probably have 20 other things more important on their mind when at the voting booth.
Then ban smoking under 26 for everyone under 26. That would be a sensible law.
What is proposed is something very different in kind.
Yeah, that seems a sensible compromise.
Compromise, sure. I'm an ex-smoker, we can make smoking completely illegal for all I care. Again, I just think it's absurd that a government can think it is in any way legitimate to pass a law that only affects one class of people and passes it only when that class of people have no representation in government. That is a kind of tyranny, we shouldn't pretend it's not.
> they could elect a part that has it in their manifesto
You can't seriously be naive enough to think that's how party politics works?
> 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.
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.
> Why not just pass a law that says people born after 2008 have to pay higher taxes, and work longer hours for less pay?
That in general is what inflation is
No. That's very much not what inflation is.
As a former smoker (who quit for seven years and regrets taking it up again), and as a present-day vape user, wtf. This is a clear restriction on liberty. It may be stupid that I do it. Just like many stupid decisions (junk food included), it ought to be my right to decide how to live.
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"
In a country with a national health system, why should you be able to internalize the benefit of smoking whilst externalizing the cost?
Then ban McDonalds. Ban cigarettes outright for all. Give federal funding to healthy alternatives. Raise tax on sugar 200%. Alcohol 500%. Use federal funds to make cities walkable. Give police the mandate to enforce more action on violent criminals. Fund unions. Fine employers where people work longer than 8 hours per day on average. Fine employers who do not grant mandatory 5 weeks vacation per year.
This is the world where the interests of the NHS is what counts for making the rules. Many countries implement at least some of these measures, to great success.
You could use this logic to ban unhealthy foods, or restrict people from eating too much.
https://www.diabetes.org.uk/about-us/news-and-views/junk-foo...
https://www.newfoodmagazine.com/government-bans-high-sugar-a...
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/soft-drink-levy-extended-...
Or to resist ever passing a national health system.
There is something insidious about the state forcing a citizen to pay for its services, only turn around and insist that the use of said services entitles the state to further control of the citizen.
Indeed yes. We have extremely large governmental departments regulating what can and can not be sold as food.
Not the quantity of food though. Deaths attributed to obesity are higher than those of smoking in recent years. Smoking rates are falling, but obesity continues to climb in the UK.
Trans fats are banned in restaurants in Canada.
Crazy food additives and preservatives are banned in Europe that are common in the US.
https://foodbabe.com/food-in-america-compared-to-the-u-k-why...
Considering the general state of the UK population, this may not be such a bad idea.
This is just whataboutism, but the UK also regulates sugar in fairly draconian ways too, for example.
There are good reasons to target smoking given how addictive and deadly it is. Nicotine is fairly unique in this regard.
It's reductio ad absurdum. Obesity is really bad for you and strains public health services. Should the government enforce a cap on caloric intake?
Unlike food, nicotine is not a necessity. Also calorie intake alone doesn't determine weight gain or loss. The problem of obesity is much more complex.
Governments try to address this problem through education and regulation of food. There are drugs available now to help control obesity and they're very popular, so people obviously want to avoid the condition.
I don't know why you think people should have a right to take highly addictive drugs that result in premature death. Contrary to smoker's claims, cigarettes are pure addiction and provide no benefits whatsoever to the smoker.
They already prevent advertising the sorts of foods that contribute to obesity to children, and encourage you to drink less sugary drinks by applying tax to them (though unfortunately manufacturers have responded to this by reducing choice and adding artificial sweeteners instead of selling something at a higher price that can be enjoyed once every few weeks.
I don't think any of this is unreasonable in a country that picks up the tab through both subsidised dental care and completely free-at-point-of-use healthcare.
Would a calorie cap be reasonable?
> Would a calorie cap be reasonable?
A legislation that isn't possible to enforce is not reasonable, no.
Banning cigarettes = easy to enforce.
Banning sugar in soft drinks = easy to enforce.
Limiting how many calories you can consume = how do you propose we do that? Do we even have the technology to track what someone eats? And do we carve out exceptions for athletes?
If there was a way to cap calories without surgically inserting trackers into everybody I'm sure you'd see a lot less opposition to your idea.
Whether something is possible to enforce seems like a sliding scale. We can totally imagine a world where a calorie cap is possible to enforce. In such a world, would it be reasonable?
Make a lolly bag $100 and not $1 and your problem is solved
a better solution is banning processed foods which fall below a threshold for calories/micronutrient content (and no artificial enrichment allowed)
No but you can make sure only healthy desserts are being sold. You can only stuff so much carrot cake.
Decent labelling could be a start. Even when shopping online there's basically next to 0 of actual data of what goes into product.
Forget trying to create a healthy shopping AI agent.
not could, should. i'm fully in favor of banning processed foods that fall below a threshold for calories/micronutrient ratio (and no artificial enrichment permitted)
pigouvian taxes are both a stronger disincentive and help cover externalized costs.
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
Smokers cost less in medical care because they die of heart attack and stroke before they get old enough for age-related care, along with smoking disqualifying people from many common procedures. Plus the sin taxes they pay already bring in more revenue than their entire lifetime medical costs.
> In a country with a national health system
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.
The sin taxes more than cover the healthcare costs of the associated sins. It's the untaxed sins, greed and sloth, that are fucking the NHS.
OK, so if you smoke you don't get national / socialized health care but don't have to pay the taxes that fund it either. Deal. It's enough to convince me to take up smoking.
> This is a clear restriction on liberty. ... Just like many stupid decisions (junk food included), it ought to be my right to decide how to live.
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.
There's already some pretty comprehensive bans on smoking in places where it could affect other people. I don't really encounter cigarette smoke in my day-to-day life.
> There's already some pretty comprehensive bans on smoking in places where it could affect other people.
Which I'm arguing are disregarded most of the times by most smokers. I do encounter cigarette smoke in my day-to-day, unfortunately. And unfortunately it's always the same places, mostly bars and restaurants that have outdoor spaces. Places where I'm supposed to smell food I pay for, and I end up smelling smoke instead.
However, people born before 2008 smoking around you, affects you, as well. If they want to protect people they need to ban it for everybody..
> If they want to protect people they need to ban it for everybody..
Last time governments tried to force people to do something for their own sake, you saw how it ended (COVID). If people can't start smoking cigarettes, they won't get hooked up, so gradually at least regular cigarettes will be phased out. Vapes are still controversial, but as a non-smoker with a very sensitive nose, vape smoke is 10000x better than cigarette smoke. It doesn't cause me to cough, it doesn't contain harmful chemical compounds, it doesn't soil clothes nearly as much, and I can still smell food at a restaurant.
>This is a clear restriction on liberty.
So is banning the sale of leaded gasoline.
The head rush of the first leaded gasoline inhale in the morning used to beat any cigarette, too.
> "it ought to be my right to decide how to live"
"Why is the government stopping me from murdering people and stealing from them? it's my right to decide how I live!"
I think that a government should be able to ban murdering people but that it would very sketchy for them to ban it for some people and not others.
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.
This is nonsense. There is a logic to the law, it's not arbitrary.
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.
You vill get your state mandated 1 hour of exercise and 5 servings of vegetables. You VILL eat only the state mandated bug based protein that our studies have shown to be 10% less likely of causing heart attacks than red meat. YOU VILL NOT spend more than 1 hour outside to prevent skin cancer.
>our studies have shown to be 10% less likely....
You are not nearly jaded enough.
If the construction industry is any indication the stuff these people mandate is lucky to have 1% at best and that's with "money motivated" numbers cooked up in academic labs funded by the same industries that benefit from the rules.
This is a great argument. Let's use it to ban sugar and meat.
Kinda like being in a country where nobody born past a certain date can ever be a citizen.
Unless their ancestors were already citizens beforehand.
Which I guess could be considered a more generous concession.
A restriction on liberty? For a britbong? What a surprise.
It's a restriction on liberty but not an unjustified one. I agree that it gives cigarettes a "mystique" that they do not deserve to have one generation able to smoke if they like while another generation has to go outside the law to do so.
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.
People should be able to do things that provide them with little value. Over-eating and drinking alcohol seem to be some of the UK's favourites, far more than smoking.
If I want to smoke in my own home I should be able to. Next up the government will ban reading hacker news for people born after 2012 because it incentivizes you sitting in your chair too much.
Might be a good idea tbh
How is it that different for it being banned for underage vs banned for people born after 2008?
Its just that for one group is never becomes okay
> wtf. This is a clear restriction on liberty
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.
A lifetime ban on purchase is a ban. Don't be ridiculous.
Not if its legal to grow your own.
This is a good thing.
Maybe I could sit here and debate the pros and cons, supposed crap about my liberties, is the age bracket the right way to go about it. But this is a good thing, there is nothing good about cigarettes no matter which way you argue it, or compare it to anything else.
Buckle up for more legally enforceable parental guidance for how you should live your life to serve the state
Should we completely stop smoking? Yes. There is absolutely nothing about it that is good for us or anyone near those smoking.
Its not just how you life your life to the state, its for your own health and those around you. Your life will be marginally better without cigarettes.
100% agree. What else follows from this line of thinking and will people have the power and ability to protect those activities when the next one comes. Yes the slippery slope is real. Look at the encroachment of surveillance capitalism. Sociopaths take an inch they take a mile and tell you its for your own good
This is an obscenity.
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So, then some day in the distant future a 66 year-old guy standing outside a store will be asking a 67 year-old guy to buy him a pack of smokes.
It's sad that the UK, which invented liberal philosophy, is increasingly accepting of paternalism. It's important that people have an inviolable personal sphere inside which they can live their lives as they see fit. That includes making decisions of which society disaproves.
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 real answer would be to ban all commercial cultivation and sales, but keep personal consumption legal. It's the multi-billion dollar tobacco industry that systematically hooks people through advertising, not the plant. Something tells me not many folks will be growing tobacco plants in their basement to get a fix.
It's been this way for over 60 years. Big Mommy tells you how to live.
we now have empirical evidence of where liberalism leads us: to an amoral, predatory marketplace. which profits from exploiting people who are helplessly addicted to poisons like nicotine, processed foods and alcohol. how much worse does it need to get before we go back to the drawing board?
Liberalism has led us to almost unbelievable prosperity. The fact that it has some downsides does not suggest that we have to "go back to the drawing board"
is this your argument? "the fact that they're dying as a direct result of us becoming unbelievably prosperous does not suggest anything needs to change"
Smoking is clearly harmful, but I'm not sure about laws that criminalize adults from deciding what they want to do with their own bodies. Health care costs are a factor, but I don't know about the UK but in the US these days, junk food and sodas probably incur more health care costs through obesity, than smoking.
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.
Exactly. This ageist, discriminatory, paternalistic prohibition will create crime and a black market and won't solve much of anything.
They ban buying cigarettes, not nicotine in general, correct? In that case, I would compare it to making catalytic converters mandatory in new cars in the 1970s.
You still can pickup nicotine consumption, but with xx % less carcinogens :)
Drinking has been decided to be totally fine though, no need to ban that - probably because it's unfashionable to smoke, and the kind of people who come up with these laws find it uncouth. It will also be ridiculous in a few years when the UK inevitably decides to legalise marijuana - totally fine to smoke a joint, but don't you dare put any of that tobacco in it!
Drinking doesn’t affect others as direct as smoking does.
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.
Drinking affects others much more than smoking does, it's just that it doesn't affect random strangers. In a study of the harms of various substances, alcohol came out on top by a mile for the damage it does to the family and others close to the drinker.
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.
"Ranked by drug experts on damage to user, impact on crime, and socioeconomic effects"
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.
This isn't the smoking gun you think it is though.
Of course Alcohol and Tobacco are high up on the list because they are legal. The percentage of people drinking vs percentage of people doing heroin is not even comparable.
Apparently <0.2% of people in the UK are heroin users. [0]. Apparently above 50% of people in the UK drink once a week or more [1]
[0] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10278447/ [1] - https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
What should be surprising is that 0.2% of the population results in the second highest negative impacts on society. Not that something the vast majority partake in causes the most issues, of course it does given the sheer scale of it.
Put simply, imagine if 50% of the UK did Heroin at least once a week, it would be much worse than alcohol usage.
Nobody was ever attacked on the street by a tobacco-addled stranger at 3 in the morning though. Besides, they're not banning indoor smoking, they're banning it entirely - including vaping and other nicotine products.
Prohibition (of alcohol) wouldn't work, but over time the government has raised alcohol duty rates:
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".
Nicotine is insanely addictive, so ya.
Alcohol is very difficult to ban as you can take almost any kind of sugar feedstock and turn it into alcohol.
Right. Booze is straight up naturally occurring, albeit rare. That's why you get drunk monkeys and other wildlife. The animal is like "Actually this moldy fruit is pretty good" - they did absolutely nothing to manufacture booze but here it is.
Newsflash: Its possible to consume "marijuana" w/o smoking it (just like nicotine!).
They're not banning smoking in general (which would be impossible anyway, what are they going to do, make it illegal to set something on fire and breathe it in?), they're banning nicotine products. I also really doubt that they will legalise weed and then say "but of course you're not allowed to smoke it, edibles only".
"they're banning nicotine products" If I am not mistaken, they are banning to sale of tobacco, not nicotine:
"[..]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?
Tbh I'm worried that this is directionally bad and we're more likely to see a pointless crackdown on weed.
Drinking has been declining on its own.
Alcohol costs the UK 4-5x more than smoking. Coincidentally, it's the upper classes drug of choice. Must be a coincidence though
I’d say cocaine is the upper class drug of choice. Regardless, alcohol is every classes drug of choice. The debate over whether the government is hypocritical or not kind of ignores the reality that British voters don’t want alcohol banned. So the government isn’t going to ban it. Which is broadly what you’d want a government to do!
Alcohol is the deadliest and has the biggest social costs of any drug. Nicotine is second, heroin is a distant third.
Drugs that are largely harmless, like MDMA, are illegal with heavy penalties.
Drug policy is largely nonsense and rampantly hypocritical.
MDMA is a lot more acutely dangerous than nicotine, and somewhat moreso than alcohol. If you drink too much, you'll vomit, and for the most part be fine. Obviously that not always true (I'm sure everyone knows at least one person who had to have their stomach pumped in college), but for the vast majority of users, their body's natural defense against being poisoned works fine.
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.
As the US found out, alcohol is very very hard to ban because it is very very easy to make.
Also popular and part of the culture. Jesus turned water into wine but didn't pop out for 20 Marlboro.
Weed and tobacco are also very easy to make. They literally grow on trees[1].
[1] Technically, herbaceous plants.
Really in the case of tobacco, (almost) no one is going to grow it. It's a massive pain in the ass when most people are addicted to the nicotine. Synthetic nicotine in vapes are what would be black marketed these days.
It's way easier to ship as well discreetly, borderline impossible to seize in reality, which is probably one of the reason in SEA they are about to ban vaping, it's really a huge gateway to transport anything, very rarely LE is opening open and testing what the vape contains, so transporting large amount of any substances has never been easier.
Weed and tobacco smoking are also easy to detect by people who don't want secondhand smoke. And if it were illegal, they could report it.
> Upper classes drug of choice
You're joking me. It costs more in Australia for a pack of cigarettes than it does for multiple beers or even a bottle of decent wine.
Alcohol is not the upper classes drug of choice, its all classes drug of choice.
At least alcohol produces side effects that people enjoy. Smoking pretty much only has negative side effects once you get hooked.
Have you ever smoked? I feel like I only hear this sentiment from people that have never tried nicotine.
Nicotine absolutely produces effects that people enjoy. Smokers don't just do it because they want to smell bad and look cool.
Yes, I smoked for a decade. The only noticeable effect it produces after a while is providing relief from nicotine withdrawal symptoms. It does feel similar to regaining focus or calming your nerves, so smokers trick themselves into thinking that's what it actually does. Nicotine is also way, way more addictive than alcohol. I've gone months without alcohol with almost no mental effort but day 3 of quitting smoking was probably one of the most miserable and challenging of my life.
Is there proof that the positive effects are still there after you're hooked? Or are the "positive effects" at that point just a cessation of the negative effects of withdrawal?
Yes, absolutely. It's a stimulant, similar to caffeine. Just like how nearly everyone adjusts their caffeine consumption based on the situation (got to buckle down, drink an extra cup of coffee), people do the same with nicotine. It also still works as an appetite suppressant.
Now, the euphoric effects that you get at first, those very rapidly go away with tolerance. With habitual use, you probably only experience a tiny shadow of that with the first hit of the day, or a respectable replay if for whatever reason you go a couple days without (which is heightened by the cessation of withdrawal). The nausea and disorientation also go away, which is nice since otherwise it would be a problem.
Sitting in a room with someone drinking doesn't give you cancer.
Just ban smoking indoors then
It gives you cancer outdoors too!
Can anyone attest if young people are actually taking up cigarettes again? I was talking with a friend that teaches teenagers and she was explaining how many students that once were getting in trouble for vaping/pouches have now turned on to cigarettes. Completely boggles my mind - I thought the newer generation had a much stronger aversion to physical cigarettes.
Just from my subjective view and observation, I'd say yes. It feels like a lot more people (younger than 30 roughly) smoke more than people around my peer group (mid 30s).
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
At least in my younger brother's social circles, cigarettes are considered the inferior, but sometimes more available, good. They're hooked on nicotine via vapes, but it's sometimes easier to get a hold of cigarettes. That doesn't mean they smoke nearly as many cigarettes as we'd be used to seeing from a smoker pre-vapes, since once they can refill/buy another disposable vape they'll preferentially use those.
I do volunteer work at a youth organization in the Netherlands. Recently smoking has become a lot more popular. Nearly all kids between 18 and 25 smoke here. There is also a very clear group effect. People start smoking because others are doing it.
History has shown prohibition can be… problematic.
Just tax it very very heavily and apply education / social pressure?
See the problems with the Australian system, which is basically what you describe.
Exactly this.
Australia (and the States) tried to impose ever increasing tax and restriction on smoking and over the last few years, smoking has reached critical mass, with more people smoking, cheaper smokes, and smokes becoming more available AND less regulated.
Previously a 20 pack was around $40-60 at most smoke shops, then the illegal darts started to come in, they were priced as low as $6 or $8 for the cheapest 20 pack. They become rampant and barely anyone purchased genuine smokes. In fact, these illegal smoke stores were exactly like real smoke shops, proper business, proper storefront and everything. Excluding the prices, you couldn't tell you were buying illegal products.
"Ah, smoking is not good for you, and it's been deemed that anything not good for you is bad; hence, illegal" — Demolition Man, 1993
What about tourists and foreigners? Most smokers can't go more than a few hours without smoking... This will surely lead to a large black market.
They can bring it with them.
The law (as proposed) restricts sales and giving to someone else, not the smoking itself.
https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/60034/documents/628...
Will this market be significant? This would surely affect a very small percentage of visitors.
22% of the global population are smokers according to Wikipedia. It's probably lower for younger generations but still significant.
Why not just get your nicotine fix via one of the handful of other delivery methods which are not banned? Or just find a local black market doggie hookup, same as you would for any other illegal substance?
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.
For a lot of smokers, e-cigarettes and other alternatives don't cut it. But I agree there'll likely be a black market.
Easy: anyone who cannot submit to the law of a country should not go there.
It will probably be a bit of both: a large black market and a decline in foreign visitors, international conferences, and similar events.
I didn't find anything particular, but in general it should apply to anyone under the jurisdiction. I think it's illegal to drink underage in the US, even if the person is a tourist and they are allowed to drink by their own country's law.
This is good and all, but they should probably also restrict the advertising of nicotine products in this country. Coming here from the states, I was astounded that you can advertise Zyn like nicotine pouches in tube stations and around in public.
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Im curious how the industry allowed this. Seems like a tremendous amount of lobbying money would oppose it. There must be real story there, somewhere.
Are you in America? I only ask because this mindset, that lobbyists are capable of squashing any law they dislike, is not internationally universal.
Not to say lobbyists don’t have an effect in the UK, they do. But the US has a particularly egregious setup.
The cigarette lobbyists are not what they used to be. A pack is £15+ of mostly tax, beige green colour, and has gruesome health warning images. They "let" all that happen.
I assume all the ones who were young enough to have worked tobacco at its peak are now working for Meta, OpenAI or Flutter.
The real story may be that even despite heavy lobbying, they are trying to do something that has the potential to benefit the population, with the added benefit of reducing some of the load on health care system caused by this.
As we know, smoking can cause lots of problems, including for babies if the mother smokes during pregnancy.
They probable have better margins on vapes so they don't care.
Only in America, where markets magically solve all issues.
this
Hopefully vaping will still be legal? They do distinguish the difference between inhaling burnt matter vs inhaling a heated aerosol, yes?
Of course not. The only thing government and private enterprise seems good at these days is taking things away from people. Logic be damned.
Although much less harmful than smoke, nicotine is still not harmless to the cardiovascular system. If the goal is public health, it makes sense to move the needle a little further and try to keep people off nicotine entirely.
Alcohol is another story, we're not ready to remove that yet.
After alcohol, are we going to stop people from having multiple sexual partners in their lifetime? Because if public health is the goal, that would solve a lot of problems.
It is fine to attempt to improve public health, but not at the cost of giving people a life worth living.
If alcohol is what gives you "a life worth living," that's extremely concerning.
Nicotine is less harmful than sugar. Not even close. Ban sugar. Ban everything. Safety nausea.
I think it’s the combination of health impact and addiction
UK has public/socialized healthcare.
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.
We should ban scrolling social media for people born after a certain date and legally mandate an hour of exercise per day and eating 5 servings of vegetables. If you don't listen, one month in jail. The state has decided that since it pays for your healthcare, it will now tell you how to live your life.
There are all kinds of activities/behaviors whose costs are socialized: obesity, driving, sitting around all day/not exercising, living in suburbs, gambling, engaging in sports (broken bones cost society!). That's kind of the point of a society though - to pay for socialized costs. If the goal is to make every individual pay for the consequences of their own decisions what's the point of public healthcare or insurance in general?
I wonder what the cost/benefit analysis is for different addressable health outcomes. For example, under this justification could a government mandate a restricted calorie diet or enforce daily resistance training?
You're making my point by making sweeping deeply personal policy for people without first citing how much less dangerous vaping nicotine is vs using tobacco.
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
Then charge smokers much more for healthcare rather than collectively punishing and discriminatorily reducing the rights of a group of people arbitrarily. Individual freedom and consequences rather than prior restraint.
If the cost of having socialised healthcare is so severe maybe we should stop socialising healthcare before we start banning risky activities.
As the saying goes - "Alcohol is an excellent servant, but a terrible master." The same could be said for Metrics. So much is measurable these days, and we love to watch the chart go up or down. If it hasn't been measured, it doesn't exist. And the bureaucrats conjure reality with nothing but a spreadsheet and the flourish of a rubber stamp.
Do they plan to introduce social media ban as well for people born after 2010?
A ban for people born before 2010 would be reasonable
Are they going to continue selling cigarettes and vapes for people born before that date. I've always found the career as a prohibition smuggler a somewhat romantic notion so at some point I may be able to take it up.
Ah yes, smuggling lung cancer. How romantic.
> Stop doing things that hurt you !! You need to live your life like a min-max optimization for max lifespan. !! You haven't done your government mandated hour of exercise today, enjoy 30 days in prison !!
This wasn't even about that. It was about selling cigarettes to others, pretending to be a romantic rebel.
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.
You WILL get your state mandated 1 hour of exercise everyday and you will eat your state mandated five servings of vegetables. You will not go outside for more than an hour a day to prevent skin cancer. If you were born after 2010, you will eat the state mandated bug-based red meat replacement. You don't even need to stop eating meat, you just can't start.
Bro what
trvke
People should have the right to make bad decisions, because with a population of millions of individuals you can not accurately decide what is a bad decision and what is just a less bad decision.
First I've heard of generational ban was in a hundred years old novel from Jack London (maybe an autobiography ? can't remember the name). It certainly was about alcohol, maybe he mentioned tobacco as well, anyway the idea and debate certainly aren't new.
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. ?
In a few years, they'll realize that the savings from public health care now requires an an even higher amount of money poured into the police, customs and justice systems to enforce it. Because suddenly, there are these weirdos trying to sell it in dark places. Who could anticipate that?
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.
> an even higher amount of money poured into the police
Given the massive cost smoking imposes on the health sector, I find it hard to believe that's remotely possible.
2B if you tease the reality out of the oft misreported figure, and the annual rake from smoking is 8-10B so it is profitable to maintain it.
This enforcement costs argument is wrong. The point is not to enforce such a ban, it's to signal where the collective consensus is.
Maybe growing kits , for sale will grow? ie seeds , and other useful / needed growing accessories .... reply
I've been accosted outside enough shops to buy underage smokers a pack of cigs to know how well this will work.
This lack of social consensus is the problem here. A national referendum would be better, as it provides a way to force people to consider the changes and decide.
great idea, let's people without skin in the game to vote for whose who have.
let us people?
I think that banning smoking in public places makes sense because you are impacting other people. I think banning things for kids makes sense because it’s a big wide world and it’s our duty to protect them. I’m not a fan of banning the things that a grown adult can do when it only affects them personally, however much I despise smoking. Since when have people decided that giving up personal liberty is fine. If you want to look 15 years older with gross teeth, horrible smell and die at 60, it’s kind of up to you.
This is insanely dumb. Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you. So if people want to do it anyway who cares. I understand the cafe and indoor space bans but not allowing anyone to do it seems stupid. I don’t smoke but UK has really gone off the deep end recently with social controls, what is the point?
I, a non-smoker, would like to not walk through clouds of smoke.
That's what I say when I breathe car exhaust. Why cannot all combustion engines be removed from society for my health preference?
That's one of the reasons they are banned from selling new ones starting in 2035.
I don't want to inhale microplastics from tire wear. When will this be addressed?
Sounds a like next century problem to me.
Some cities have streets where internal combustion engines are banned.
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.
While I appreciate those efforts, and do not mind tobacco-free streets, I'll also note that some cities have unfiltered power plant exhaust falling on them, carried by the jet stream from other cities vast distances away, which care less about the problem. The local solution may not be the optimal solution.
When they came for the smokers, I did not care, because I was not a smoker.
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.
> So [...] who cares.
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.
i this context, "who cares" means "whose business". and the answer by the western society is that no ones but person in question.
bucketing ppl by birth year is literally a discrimination.
> i this context, "who cares" means "whose business".
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.
It's insanely dumb in the same way prohibition was insanely dumb in the US during the twenties.
Heroin is bad as well and it's forbidden on account of that.
Kinda pointless the government looking muscular on this when the real issue has moved on anyway to vaping, access to weed etc. The industry lobbying wont come after the govt anyway so no blocks right, as they are getting profit from elsewhere
People have been smoking tobacco for 12,000 years. How about nanny states fuck off and let people do what they want with their body. I would be happy for regulation of additives that tobacco companies adulterate their products with, but I should be able to smoke any plant I want.
I defend to the death individual choice but I'm also okay if the healthcare system wants a surcharge for voluntary lifestyle choices that cause first-, second-, and third-order health problems. That a universal healthcare system exists should never be used to rationalize universal, Orwellian deprivation of rights and invasive control of what people can do with their bodies or how to live. "No" to discrimination, collective punishment, and removal of liberty, but I'm okay with costs for voluntary choices.
It's hard to say if smoking weed (blunts or the useless nonfiltration of a bong) is worse than smoking cigarettes because of the lack of filter, but I'd probably try filtered atomization (not necessarily vaping) rather than breathing in ash and tiny smoke particles that destroy lung capacity. To each, their own.
If anything, I think it will only increase the number of young people smoking.
Just like that - Smoking just got infinitely more cool among UK youth
I have a slightly different take on this. Tobacco is a product that is sold by producers who know it is both highly addictive and extremely bad for their customers' health. That should be illegal. But it should not be illegal for people to consume (as long as they don't harm others via second hand smoke). The principle is simple: harming other people deliberately is wrong. (Harming yourself is merely stupid).
So I would ban the manufacture and sale of tobacco, but make it perfectly legal to grow your own. Smoke as much as you want. Just don't harm others.
I don't necessarily have a problem with it, but this is just stealth micro-pensions. Expect tobacco purchases by Gen-X'ers and Millenials to skyrocket over the next few decades.
Interesting to see them do this when the original study in Singapore did not (initially) enact the ban.
Did they just follow on from New Zealand?
<sarcasm> Oh yeah, banning people who can't vote yet, genius.
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.
Smoking is debilitating, so is alcohol, drugs and gambling. Since the last >100 we see a trend to gradually restrict them, one by one, albeit inconsistently. Smoking was a casual habit in the 60s, next it was banned indoors and now before a certain age. In the (not too) distant future it might me totally banned next to its cousin, cannabis. Tldr, the decision is not surprising but expected, following the trend.
You can kind of tell when people think about only themselves or the community when they present arguments for things like smoking and vaccination.
"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!
> I prefer humans can make choices for themselves and have reasonable autonomy when it does not have a negative affect on others.
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.
Is taking concepts to logical extremes a good way to govern?
(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.
You're not going far enough. We need to mandate exercise.
next thing you know they'll also ban murder for people born after 2008
UK becomes the safest country in the world, peace forever
Murder is one of the first things that most governments ban.
Natural consequence of socialized medicine. If I’m paying for your healthcare then I (and by extension the state) get a say in basically every aspect of your life.
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
In the UK tobacco is heavily taxed and those taxes bring in more money than the cost on the healthcare service.
Interesting - do you have a link about the financial accounting around this?
If you google it, revenue is at £8 billion (Office for Budget Responsibility) and in decline, and NHS spending is at £2.6 billion in England, so the bulk of it (NHS England).
I do not have the specific info/ref to hand, but at one point some years ago, smoking brought in something of the order of nine times as much into the NHS as it spent on smoking related illnesses. I was very surprised by this.
Even so, the NHS's goals are rightly such that greatly reducing the harm done by smoking is preferred over keeping this revenue. Unlike a tobacco company that would not factor harms external to the organisation into the profit and loss calculation.
You can not put a price on human suffering.
Tylenol is much less dangerous than, say, Advil. It’s only issue is one of overdose which is common to all drugs.
I think you might be missing the point I was trying to make
Don't worry they're working on banning most of those. The UK has a sugar tax and will ban fires (God forbid people are energy independent!)
You could throw in skate boards, pornography, slate roofs, criticising government policy and the policy, gluten, and chewing gum.
Enjoy setting up a GoFundMe if you ever get cancer.
Let us look at the cancer survival rates in the US vs countries with socialized medicine. I know for a fact when the business elite of my Euro country gets cancer they fly to NY. They don't pay taxes either tho so I guess it works for them.
The other natural consequence of socialized medicine is rationing. In Canada the waiting time for treatment is often months or years[1]. That GoFundMe might give you a higher survival rate.
[1] https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/article/more-than-23000-canadi...
Wait until you see how many people die from waiting for medical care they care afford in the US!
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> Natural consequence of socialized medicine.
improved health outcomes?
That will for sure go well.
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."
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"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...
> He is new in post as a trading standards manager at Bolton Council in Greater Manchester but worked for 10 years on a tobacco enforcement team at nearby Rochdale Council.
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.
I am interested in your thought process.
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
This is dumb. Brazil was able to extremely reduce tobacco consumption “just” with education and banning advertising.
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?
A quick Google search suggests that Brazil and the UK have similar levels of smoking in the adult population. So the UK's already succeeded in reducing smoking consumption. The aim of this legislation is to eventually eliminate it.
Someone is not learning from history.
This is the kind of action that really requires a referendum.
I completely disagree. Obviously people individually want to smoke - nicotine makes them feel good! - and there's a good chance they would vote to preserve that "right," but smoking is bad for society and we would unambiguously be better off if it didn't exist.
One of the principal jobs of government is to stand for the good of the collective against individual selfishness.
The collective just means the majority of individuals. That's why there should be a referendum.
"My body, some distant governments choice"
How is this constitutional lol. Especially the age discrimination aspect.
The UK doesn't have a constitution.
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Bans are surely going to work for sure. /s
I hate how British people say "agreed" as if it implies "was" and "to". And lots of other things it implies, such as who, when and why.
How do you feel about the word "okay"? The word can mean anything. Must drive you nuts.
I don't think there's anything peculiarly British about that usage. It's easy to find examples of Americans doing the same thing, e.g.:
>The report, in an op-ed from commentator David Ignatius, cites a senior US official as saying that “the framework is agreed” and the parties are now “negotiating details of how it will be implemented.”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/washington-post...
I think it's short for "agreed upon"
Well they're English, they invented the language. I don't know why they're trampling on it.
headlines often trade legibility for terseness, sometimes a bit too much though :)
EDIT: Headlinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headline#Headlinese
Languages evolve, capiche?