Setting aside 1 and looking at 2, it seems silly to me to point out that other things (alcohol) that cause problems and are not being restricted. You take the wins where you find them, and the government isn't a magical force that can impose its will on the people arbitrarily. This is obviously the government responding to the general sense of the people (perhaps putting its thumb on the scale). The UK doesn't support cigarettes, so the law gets passed. If someone has a public opinion poll there showing less than 50% support for this, I'd love to see it.
Alcohol is heavily restricted, though. You can't sell it to minors, younger minors can't drink it in public, you can't sell/buy/make it above a certain proof, you can only resell it from authorized distributors, it is taxes, and so on.
Sure, banning cigarettes for a specific generation is a much more stringent restriction, but plenty of other restrictions exist.
What's heavily restricted is the sale and consumption in most public spaces.
A huge win for society
Cigarettes on the other hand are not so popular. If you ask most smokers if they regret starting about 90% say yes. They mostly want to quit but are addicted. Quite different from booze.
For booze it's much 'worse.' Nearly 80% have ever drunk alcohol but 50% of them still do. A much higher rate of ongoing use.
Also note a very large portion of people that have ever smoked have had a nice cigar or pipe, smoked once in a blue moon is extremely unlikely to cause cancer or addiction. This likely represents a 'quiet' large portion of the statistic that have ever used tobacco. The loudest are the pack a day smokers who loudly proclaim everyone else will be like them and therefore everyone else should suffer restrictions that presume the same.
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.
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.
The they later enacted the War on Drugs. They still pump billions into cartels and the federal forces.
You must live in a democracy. If you ever lived in a country where the government curtailed freedoms by fiat, you'd understand that it can and it will. I happened to be living in Vietnam when the government just randomly decided one day that smoking would be banned everywhere, effective immediately. You might think that's simply putting a thumb on the scale; but you also haven't tried to visit the New York Times website from there and later found yourself in a room with officials asking for all your passwords. And clearly you're not familiar with the preferred way of clearing traffic jams, which is driving a jeep through a crowd of motorbikes while a guy with a long bamboo cane whacks anyone who's in the way.
Thumb on the scale my ass. Totalitarianism is control over the little things.
I'm not going to lose sleep over the idea of a smoking ban, since it was already driven to the margins, but the implementation of it by age is really weird. Clearly a move to avoid annoying pensioners, like everything else.
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.
>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.
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.
But putting that aside, if a citizen supports banning cigarettes for people born after a certain date, but not alcohol, that certainly seems hypocritical to me.
I think it's very rare though for a smoker to not smoke several a day. A friend of mine was that rare breed and would buy a 10 pack occasionally - usually on a Friday and it'd be gone by Monday - but that would maybe be once a month. I think every other smoker I've met though goes through that amount every day.
So it seems to me the average smoker is much more likely to become a burden on a nationalised health service than the average drinker. There's more to this of course, smoking to excess generally doesn't increase the chances of you getting into a fight like drinking does for some people, but social pressure counters that partially too.
Basically everyone who smokes/etc is addicted to nicotine.
They aren't the same at all.
Edit: just realised I posted under the wrong comment. Doh.
Why does everyone on HN seem to have a hate boner for alcohol? The main problem there is car culture, not the alcohol.
In any case, the hypocritical part is where the UK, like many US states, has legalized marijuana for medical use and is well on its way to legalizing it for recreational use. Pipe tobacco at least smelled good. Cigarettes, not so much. But marijuana smells like a mix of stale cigarettes and body odor. AND the second hand smoke isn't just harmful, it can make you high along with the dirty smelling marijuana smoker. At least with nicotine, it sharpens your concentration. THC on the other hand makes you a lazy Cheeto eating couch potato with no future.
What mechanisms do you foresee for it to fail? If stores stop selling cigarettes, the UK will have no other choice but to stop smoking them. I wonder what will come to replace them though. People have a peculiar tendency of forming addictive habits.
Regarding question 2, personally, I am uncomfortable with the idea of a nanny state.
The rules are made by politicians.
All it takes to change the rules is to rotate politicians.
Or enough public dissent that the same politicians are forced to revert the rules.
This might play right into the hands of bootleggers and gangs but also into the Swedish / American nicotine pouch industry which is basically marketing straight at kids.
Also - vapes. Most folks don’t smoke cigarettes anymore. How does this control vaping?
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"
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.
if this moves nicotine to the black market then the people/government will still pay the cost without receiving any taxes on it at all
I 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.
I guess that liberty was plenty abused on every non-smoker in a non-smoking area, that ended up coughing in clouds of smoke anyway. Smoking affects everyone around you whether you want it or not, and while you may smoke for 50 years and end up being perfectly healthy, some may get cancer from it, even for a very small dose.
So is banning the sale of leaded gasoline.
"Why is the government stopping me from murdering people and stealing from them? it's my right to decide how I live!"
One of the most important foundations of democracy is that the law applies to everyone equally. If smoking is banned, it should be banned for everyone, not banned for some people and allowed for a privileged class who got here first.
Unless their ancestors were already citizens beforehand.
Which I guess could be considered a more generous concession.
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.
Its just that for one group is never becomes okay
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.
Drugs that are largely harmless, like MDMA, are illegal with heavy penalties.
Drug policy is largely nonsense and rampantly hypocritical.
An MDMA overdose, however, needs active, external cooling to ride out. We don't really have a natural safety valve for overconsumption.
That's not to say it should remain banned (I'm quite pro-legalization myself), but it's not entirely arbitrary to have MDMA banned versus other, less acutely dangerous drugs. Better examples of unjustifiably banned drugs are psychedelics such as LSD.
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.
Nicotine absolutely produces effects that people enjoy. Smokers don't just do it because they want to smell bad and look cool.
Most of the indoor smoking bans in the U.S. have been based entirely on the fact that second hand smoke affects the employees who are forced to be there.
Further, drinking has a far deeper cultural resonance, so smoking is clearly the lower hanging fruit.
And it’s not like the UK has not been taking action against drinking. For example, they’ve imposed minimum alcohol taxes which have been directly linked to lower consumption.
I should qualify the above: it doesn't affect random strangers as often as second-hand smoke does. But drunk driving and drunk violence are a thing, and both can affect anyone.
1. Alcohol 2. Heroin 3. Crack Cocaine 4. Cocaine 5. Tobacco
I think these laws are bizarre morality rituals. Evidence doesn't conclude it has anything to do with public health when you see how vicious alcohol is.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/alcohol-duty-rates
That cuts down on drinking, except for the alcoholics of course. Scotland also imposed a minimum price per unit on alcohol, in an attempt to further cut consumption:
https://www.gov.scot/policies/alcohol-and-drugs/minimum-unit...
Whether that works is an open question, but in the UK things like "the sugar tax" have a visible affect on consumer consumption rates of "bad things".
Alcohol is very difficult to ban as you can take almost any kind of sugar feedstock and turn it into alcohol.
Of course not. The only thing government and private enterprise seems good at these days is taking things away from people. Logic be damned.
Alcohol is another story, we're not ready to remove that yet.
It is fine to attempt to improve public health, but not at the cost of giving people a life worth living.
If you are a smoker, you are much more likely to be a burden on this system.
Makes sense to ban these types of activities if the costs of them are socialized rather than individualized.
My question is why aren't you or the people making these policies interested? It's consequential stuff done ignorantly and recklessly.
Determine scientifically how dangerous vaping nicotine or THC is before banning it. That's call rational. Not reckless
The law (as proposed) restricts sales and giving to someone else, not the smoking itself.
https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/60034/documents/628...
If you’re a pothead who can’t make it through your day without a smoke, then god knows you’ll find a connect - and if you’re addicted to cigarettes, I’m pretty sure you won’t have much trouble getting your fix.
Not to say lobbyists don’t have an effect in the UK, they do. But the US has a particularly egregious setup.
I assume all the ones who were young enough to have worked tobacco at its peak are now working for Meta, OpenAI or Flutter.
As we know, smoking can cause lots of problems, including for babies if the mother smokes during pregnancy.
There's a general trend of trying to "optimize" society to remove all ills, and once you apply that logic, there's no clear stopping point. Once you ban sale of tobacco products, you can use that same logic to ban anything, from Cheetos to skydiving to motorcycles.
I do. I prefer people not to get lung cancer, among other afflications. And for no benefit that I can think of.
I don't live in the UK, but I say: good to them, and boo to you, for your misanthropic attitude.
bucketing ppl by birth year is literally a discrimination.
It just seems completely absurd to me that a government thinks it's acceptable to treat a generation unable to vote differently from the generations who can. It's really an absurd unfreedom and a kind of tyranny.
Why not just pass a law that says people born after 2008 have to pay higher taxes, and work longer hours for less pay? People should be equal under the law.
We already do this, the UK State Pension age is currently rising from 66 to 67 for those born on or after April 6, 1960.
This change affects, for example, those born between April 1960 and March 1961, who will have a pension age of 66 plus a set number of months.
When I was young, it was 65 for men and 60 for women (from the 1940s until 2010)
My point here is that this is under 18s currently have no representation, and they're passing laws that will forever treat them as a kind of underclass, "for their own good." It's genuinely ridiculous that it's allowed to happen. In doing this, the UK -- for all it's progress a creating a mostly symbolic nobility -- will now allow a new kind of class system to emerge, where the young can be overtly dominated and discriminated against by the old. It's ridiculous. People should be equal under the law.
This is one of the ways they broke the unions in the US. They offered agreements where new hires would get lower pay and fewer benefits than the old workers. Evil.
That in general is what inflation is
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
You could throw in skate boards, pornography, slate roofs, criticising government policy and the policy, gluten, and chewing gum.
improved health outcomes?
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.
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.
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.
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
But that's for another government to deal with, of course. Not our problem. Oh, and the future government will be happy to announce they are giving funding that will go to new jobs!
I propose a ban on people that use bans as a brain-less cheap way of fixing complex issues.
Given the massive cost smoking imposes on the health sector, I find it hard to believe that's remotely possible.
"I don't want to be controlled" is a perfectly valid argument, and I prefer humans can make choices for themselves and have reasonable autonomy when it does not have a negative affect on others.
Vaccination and smoking affects people around you. Drinking does too - in certain cases, but much less directly, in most cases. For example, drinking and operating vehicles is already illegal. Drinking and punching someone is already illegal!
How far do you want to take this? Your choice of diet may have a negative effect on others by way of having to pay for additional medical care.
(No.)
But are you saying we don't care if things have negative effect on people? If we go to extremes, well then obviously everyone should have 100% autonomy? Oops that doesn't work.
So, this is the hard part - you have to find balance, compromise, a reasonable middle ground. That's always going to be the hard part. Not black or white, but the grey areas.
>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...
Just tax it very very heavily and apply education / social pressure?
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.
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.
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.
UK becomes the safest country in the world, peace forever
Funding the "biggest threat the UK ever faced" according to Phil Mykytiuk, who has spent a decade mapping tobacco crime gangs in the north of England with a customer base of 10-11 million potential customers and rising every year, will surely cut heavily into their profits…
It gets tiresome to buy a new house every week because the dry wall is full with cash, again.
"Yo, psst, want to buy some Lucky Strikes? You know what will go really well with that? This white widow super cheese, and if you feel tired I also got some soap for you, first line on the house." "You’re afraid your parents might smell it? I can get you a discount on this perfume, smells like Aventus but way cheaper."
-
"Mykytiuk, though, believes the multiple layers of crime behind cheap, illegal tobacco are escaping scrutiny, allowing crime gangs – emboldened by the lack of deterrent – to expand their power base right under the noses of enforcement.
Having witnessed Kurdish tobacco gang members invest heavily in property and high street businesses here in the UK, he’s now seeing evidence of them moving into cannabis farms.
“But forget drugs,” he says. “Drugs are yesterday. The big thing is tobacco. These gangs are becoming the most capable criminals in this country. Right now it’s the biggest threat we’ve ever faced.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/criminal-gangs-are-making-bi...
Props to this Vice reporter (in 2022) for snagging an interview with a municipal staffer in a suburb of Manchester, I guess. I’m sure he’s a very busy man. But he doesn’t exactly seem notable (try Googling his name) and I’m not really sure what this is supposed to prove in the absence of any corroborating reporting.
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?
One of the principal jobs of government is to stand for the good of the collective against individual selfishness.
You still can pickup nicotine consumption, but with xx % less carcinogens :)
I find bewildering that such concepts are tried only centuries later, and wonder how it comes to be possible. Is it that we can finally enforce them, or that the lobbying have been gradually weakened, or enough data to drive decision, etc. ?
I 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.
Did they just follow on from New Zealand?
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.
