But who decides what is classified as addictive or not and what gets allowed and what censored? I certainly wouldn’t want a monopoly making the decision.

We actually know quite well the dangers of different substance and also behaviors/institutions like social media.

The necessary "institution" is called science. And even with bought/fake science science does have quite a good track record regarding things like these.

But I am actually not advocating bans on these things. Every grown up should be allowed to be irrationally dumb and destroy themselves.

But, why not tax them. Tax them so that externalities are being compensated. Make these things unattractive. Also work on changing the culture of it being cool to drink till you pass out or even the obligatory social drinking. It doesn't have to be cool.

And if anyone wants to kill themselves with substances that is OK. I don't have to like it, but I think it is their right.

But don't make me pay for their medical bills (an example) by covering it from their insurance (that becomes more expensive for me).

Disclosure: I say that as a person who lost his father prematurely because he drank too much. Way too much. My appetite for alcohol wasn't too high before, but is not existing any more since then. Still I wouldn't want to forbid it for others.

'Pay for their medical bills' quickly becomes a slippery slope. Healthy, fit individuals don't much like covering the medical bills of the obese and diabetic (type 2) people, for whom the costs of care vastly exceed those that smoke or drink. There are other medical costs that could be greatly reduced if we allow the moral police to ban other risky and destructive behavior.

That actually happens in countries that rely more on socialized medicine. For example, encouraging physical fitness and healthy food in schools is no longer a “nice to have in rich school districts” but a way to save money in the government’s budget in the long run. They don’t “ban” obesity but simply work to encourage people not to be obese. Europes lower healthcare costs and obesity rates are not uncorrelated.

(It already kind of happens in the more liberal states of the USA, where Californians are much better fit than Texans).

Many insurances in Switzerland sponsor highly local public „vita parcours“ which are some kind of training walking trails. They do it to save costs and there is only a small sign which says who sponsored it.

Switzerland’s system is what Obama and Romney care was modeled on: mandatory insurance, but prices are regulated and group plans are disallowed. As such, no company can really reduce costs that way (but it’s good PR), so it’s up to the Swiss government to ensure most healthiness (which they definitely do in ways many Americans would find authoritarian, eg the extra tax males have to pay if they are unfit for conscription).

Being Deaf I am unfit for conscription. Thirty years ago I would have needed to pay that tax (in French: Taxe d’exemption de l’obligation de servir) [0].

However I was allowed to serve in a different service: civil protection [1]. In case of war I would have gone outside and done measurements for radioactivity, chemical and biological warfare agents. My departement was called ABC (atomic, biological and chemical). I am happy and lucky that the war-games never got real.

Later people with disabilities were exempt from the tax. But then I was thirty and already discharged.

Links are to French text, sorry, no English text available.

[0]: https://www.vtg.admin.ch/fr/mon-service-militaire/generalite...

[1]: https://www.babs.admin.ch/fr/zs.html

The problem is that "having a glass of wine every now and then" is okay and doesn't come with many (if any) external costs. Why should I pay through the nose for alcoholics who abuse it? Plus, I happen to be a fairly well-paid software dev who can afford the occasional beer, but if you're a low-income earner then this occasional beer or glass of wine becomes a luxury, which doesn't strike me as entirely fair either.

I don't think "science" can really help all that much here, because a lot aspects surrounding this aren't really scientific questions. Yes, you can be informed by science to answer questions like "how addictive is this?" and "how harmful is this in what dosages?", but that doesn't really answer the question of who should pay for what, what is "fair", or what should or should not be allowed.

(and the answers to these questions aren't always clear either: is cycling a net-negative or net-positive? Health benefits from exercise, but higher risk of injuries – and why should we tax alcohol to account for all external costs but not cycling or other activities where risk is higher than some others?)

> Also work on changing the culture of it being cool to drink till you pass out or even the obligatory social drinking.

Definitely agree with this. If I say "no" then I mean "no", and trying to "oh come, just have a drink"-me is a very quick way to end up on my shit list. I've seen people do this even with people who never drink alcohol even when they know this.

Usually these high health sin taxes also help fund health systems in the majority of developed countries with socialized medicine, so it does shift the tax burden. So for high bad-health-behavior taxes you get lower income taxes for example.

They're basically the equivalent to getting a lower health insurance premium if you keep your blood pressure low or sign up for a gym for example.

In the Netherlands at least it's just added to the general funds, rather than being ear-marked for health care. Also, it turns out smoking actually saves on overall health care costs because smokers die younger; I only looked at the Netherlands, from [1]:

"On a yearly basis smokers have higher health care costs (€3.5 billion) and use more caregivers. Over the complete life-span non-smokers use more health care, especially elderly care (€8.6 billion) and care givers (€1.4 billion). This is because life expectancy is longer. In a smoke-free society health care costs will be higher per capita"

The overall gist of the article is still that smoking is bad and that a smoke-free society would be good (I agree), but health care costs don't actually seem a strong argument, in the Netherlands at least. And aside from lower health care costs, there are also less pensions to give, which saves money.

The costs of alcohol were estimated to be "€2.3 tot 4.2 billion"/year[2] (2013), which also includes police, damage, loss of productivity, etc. Health care specifically is about €450 million. The income from alcohol tax was about €1 billion, which certainly covers the health care costs, though not all of them. I'm not sure if they should: that a small group of people destroy things when drinking doesn't really need to be paid by other alcohol consumers, IMHO.

Anyway, turns out it's not as simple as "smoking = costs society money". Details may differ per country; I just looked at the Netherlands because that's where I'm from.

> They're basically the equivalent to getting a lower health insurance premium if you keep your blood pressure low or sign up for a gym for example.

I'm not sure we have this kind of thing here. Besides, what if I stay healthy by running or cycling? What if you're genetically pre-disposed to high blood pressure? You can market it as a "discount", but it's really a "premium" for people who don't do this IMHO (reminds me of getting a "discount" at some camping sites if you arrive by foot, which isn't really a "discount" but just a way of packaging "you pay for parking").

[1]: https://www.ntvg.nl/artikelen/de-rekening-van-roken#lb-3

[2]: https://www.rivm.nl/bibliotheek/rapporten/2018-0146.pdf

> "If I say "no" then I mean "no", and trying to "oh come, just have a drink"-me is a very quick way to end up on my shit list."

I could not agree more.

"I've seen people do this even with people who never drink alcohol even when they know this."

I habe been on the receiving side of this more often than I like.

The latest research I saw, sorry don’t have a source at this time and about to go to work, states that even small occasional drinks are bad for health. Alcohol is a known carcinogenic and I believe the latest stance is there are no known benefits that outweigh the risks.

Science would have banned/heavily taxed eggs in the 80s. Does science inform us about addictive products above and beyond what our every day observations tell us?

The level of evidence about eggs was spurious at best even in the 80ies. As with a lot of food science preliminary studies and ideas get overblown in media.

But at least the scientists I know would wait for the level of evidence to be high.

But as policies would be made by politicians I doubt it would work without populistic influences.

Yes, I remember the endless LDL and HDL cholesterol public health debates in the 1980s, especially arounds chicken eggs. When I was older, I learned that the Japanese consume a phenomenal amount of eggs per capita -- over 300 per year(!). (Raw egg over rice is a common breakfast dish.) Yet, the Japanese have much lower incidence of heart disease (per capita) than the United States. The reasons are multi-factor -- not all of which are understood.

Tax it too much and you'll create underground market. There's probably billions of dollars worth of amateur cigarette contraband around Europe. Fighting that wastes tons of money. But fight isn't about recouping some $, but about some sort of fairness?

What do you think about recent Chinese moves against youth excessively playing video games?

I don't know too little about that to voice an opinion.

First problem with taxing is that it takes money without consent and with force, aka theft. But that aside, do you want to get your favorite monopoly hooked on and addicted to the money taken from people’s activities that are harming themselves or others?

Taxes are theft? I never heard this line of reasoning. Care to explain?

How would a government pay for protection, infrastructure, education, and a lot of other things governments provide to their citizens?

It’s the slogan of the kind of liberal economics that’s way far too the right and involves things like private roads and (more facetiously) private McNukes.

If people in a region need protection services I am sure they will figure out a way to pay for it. Otherwise said service may not be really that important. If you worry about not getting 100% of people to pay without coercion and threatening taking their freedom to move, good news, even now over 50 percent of Americans don’t pay taxes or pay a tiny amount. The interested parties will take care of it easy.

And those who can't afford to pay for their ambulances and fire departments and roads and schools, fuck 'em, right? It's their fault for being poor, they should try harder.

Libertarians are funny people. It boggles my mind how anyone can be clueless or compassionless enough to be one.

In a free market it will be unlikely to have many poor people, as they will see the reality and settle where they are truly productive. Parents care about their children (even if you don’t think so) and reliable education will be offered to them. Fire department can be arranged by neighborhoods, nobody wants their house burning down, or very high insurance payments. Remember how much resources governments waste, they will all get cheaper, how much they tax, people will get way richer.

And yes, I believe everyone will be better off with free markets, otherwise i’d be a commie too. It’s not that I don’t care about others. I care more than most do. I see they working jobs that are not necessary, or governments destroying their purchasing power.

Fortunately I am doing pretty well, even with after the money government takes, and if I was evil or not compassionate I wouldn’t advocate for change, but rather take advantage of current system and move to the side that benefits from peoples diminished value of work. It would be way easier for me.

> In a free market it will be unlikely to have many poor people, as they will see the reality and settle where they are truly productive

That's a very wild claim, unsubstantiated by anything. The history of industrial revolution shows otherwise ( regular people are exploited to death until some regulations come to stop the most rampant abuses). Do you have anything to support your case?

> And yes, I believe everyone will be better off with free markets, otherwise i’d be a commie too.

So for you there's only communism and absolute free markets? So you're in the clueless libertarian case. Considering the freeish markets available today fail miserably at correcting for externalities such as pollution and climate change, how do you imagine absolutely free ones would do so?

I don’t really see that as a problem. Taxation (aka taking money by law) is a corrective measure to a free market failure: namely accounting for externalities. Sure, we could argue about whether some taxes are good or bad, and whether certain things should or should not be taxed, but the utility of taxation overall as a corrective measure is well understood.

I made two points since i know many add exceptions for some parties when defining theft. Care to reply to the second point?

Maybe I’m being dense, but I don’t really understand your second point. Could you be more explicit? Are you saying that the government could get addicted to a certain level of addiction in society to fund itself?

If government is dependent on smokers smoking a lot to fund its activities, what happens if some smokers decide to quit? The government has vested interest to keep number of smokers high.

This conversation ultimately leads to "We cannot ban anything because someone people might eventually ban the wrong thing", so it's not terribly interesting. It is a garden path argument toward a discussion destination about negative liberties that ultimately rests on framing negative outcomes as, "Look at all this terrible outcomes, but at least we were free to do it." I'm not sure what's appealing about that. It's ok to say, "This is currently a bad thing, let's address it now." Anyone can come up with what-if scenarios that ultimately paralyze any action from being taking. This whether deliberate, or unintentional is a strategy for maintaining the status quo.

This discussion seamlessly slided from "severely limited marketing" to "We cannot ban anything" in a 2 comment span.

I kinda feel this is the kind of escalation that also paralyses discourse when dealing with corporate behavior that affects society as a whole. We would really benefit a from "nudge"/"don't promote" approach to first limit impacts, without bringing all the ban and censorship drama in it as long as the option is not on the table.

No, we should not let a monopoly like the government banning stuff. If some groups believe this censorship better for them (or people they care for) they are free to do so, and if they are a large group a market solution will be offered to them.

It would take a lot for me to agree that market solutions optimize for just outcomes. Effecient outcomes, sure, but not just outcomes. And before Winston Churchill quotes get involved, no, absence of alternatives are not a valid justification for existence.

Yeah banning stuff is silly. I should be able to drive and practice medicine without a license, sell toxic baby formula, build houses with asbestos. The magic market will provide a solution for anyone who wants different. #Murica

PS we should ban the Wikipedia article on market failures though, can't have people reading that.

Banning by a monopoly dude. Maybe I trust a Canadian organization to regulate baby formulas better, a german one for diapers and no regulation for my hairdresser.

Yeah duh because those countries don't subscribe to brain dead free market absolutism.

A Canadian organization, not the Canadian monopoly.

"Not terribly interesting" often seems to me to mean that an argument is so direct and clear that there's really no reason to argue about it, i.e. one has already accepted as a principle that the argument must be dismissed in order to continue doing things that we deem necessary.

I don't think cigarette advertising is worse than either cigarette selling or cigarette smoking. Under the rubric of "this is currently a bad thing, lets address it now" there's actually no escaping a slippery slope.

And "We cannot ban anything because someone people might eventually ban the wrong thing" is a strawman. The people doing the banning will think it's the right thing.

It's just that a slippery slope can be constructed for any problem. The ability to universally construct a slippery slope results in absurd conclusions. Either no changes can be effected(a universal maintenance of the status quo), or slippery slopes are an invalid method at making conclusions. That's why they are categorically uninteresting.

I'll use this conversation as an example to demonstrate the absurdity. If you accept someone's argument on one topic then you may find yourself agreeing with other things they say including some terrible conclusions. Therefore, it's better to never accept anyone's argument. There are much better ways to discern whether to accept or reject an argument.

Honestly, I'm not too worried about this.

Even if the "wrong thing" is banned, this is a ban on certain types of advertising, not something that restricts your ability to buy (or sell) these things.

What exactly are the negative consequences of “censoring” advertisements for products?

Say someone bans advertisements for social media sites - how is that detrimental to society? People who don’t believe social media sites are a problem can still find and use them.

If we have a monopoly deciding, we may never know. That is why I specifically said a monopoly like government. If some people subscribe to this idea, good for them. If they are a large group, the market will offer them a solution and we will see.

The market for large groups of people is called politics. If you like unregulated markets so much, you should like monopolies, including that of political power.

It’s weird to call Switzerland democratically elected government a monopoly. It a democratic government can‘t institute a ban on trying to get kids hooked on drugs, who can?

I believe freedoms can be restricted to everyone in a region by a monopoly (government) if a very large group of people in a place vote for it. Not 50%, it would take higher percentage than that. And this way you can create basic laws, agains murder for example, nukes, heavy weapons, basic insurance, etc. And said people should have a right to withdraw their vote. If they want to censor TV this way they can. It would he stupid but they can. However to meet definition of democracy in my books, they also need to have the right to withdraw their support for that restriction of freedom, and if the threshold is not met, the law is abolished automatically after a certain period. Having a certain people create laws is ripe for corruption, and we see that everywhere including Switzerland.

If you cannot get the majority to support your censorship, and still believe it is good for a lot of people, you have to create standards and create programs that adhere to such standards that people can subscribe to voluntarily.

Some substances will sell without any marketing, such as alcohol and cannabis.

As far as controlling sales, i think a regulated market for drugs is required. So am happy to see both the Swiss initiative and also the German initiative for legalising Cannabis:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_Germany

As for Superbowl, there really hasn't been that many iconic ads for alcohol, but I'm sure Budweiser will be represented this year.

https://www.vogue.com/article/best-super-bowl-ads-of-all-tim...

> products containing addictive chemicals that correlate with public health costs

Depending on what you mean by addiction that would include a lot of normal food as well. High sugar, sugar + fat, MSG, etc.

I mean, I would prefer that food items come in more generic packages rather than them screaming in bright bold colors how great SALT + GREASE CRUNCH is the best thing that happened to humanity.

I'm not certain whether this is what you had in mind, but in the UK we have a green, amber, red (voluntary) labelling system that indicates fairly quickly at-a-glance how a food product fares in various nutritional dimensions: https://www.nutrition.org.uk/putting-it-into-practice/food-l...

That would mean that our supremarket shelves would be 1/5 of the size they are today. Who the hell needs 20 different yogurt made from cow milk?

There’s a reason we have them, and there’s a reason people buy them. I may be able to meet my nutritional needs on some proverbial Soylent green, but food also has social and psychological importance to humans too.

But here in Norway most supermarkets carry only one or two brands of yoghurt and I never feel any lack even though I am familiar with the ranges to be found in supermarkets in the UK.

So which is the tail and which the dog?

Stockholm's syndrome but for Oslo?

I agree packaging should be wayyyy more standardised (and more ecological). But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be only 2 types of yogurt.

FWIW I have a feeling when you buy food manufacturing and transport is the smallest parts of cost. Packaging and shelving are major ones. Kinda why you don't see large packaging, especially in Europe. Why does all toothpaste runs out in a month? I don't change my favourite brand for years..?

I think it would need to go beyond culture and regional boundaries to be declared an addiction. A lot of countries don't have sugar/fat/msg issues, that should at least hint at a more compounding set of issues.

Also arguably what some people see as a sugar crisis has more to do with the food industry landscape than the food components themselves. TBF finding a scapegoat is easier than dealing with complex root problems.

Funny you should mention that...

The "no" campaign said "Next they will come for your cervelas" (cervela = the Swiss version of a hot dog, highly processed meat which is considered a sacred cultural icon).

After the vote, the Young Greens were all like, "ok, next we will go for the cervela advertising!!1!"

Trolling boomers never gets old. :)

Agree on many of these points, but:

> marijuana > addictive chemicals

is one claim I am not familiar with (usually I hear “psychologically addictive”, like any pleasurable activity), but maybe I am out of date on the latest research. Anyways, swap coffee/caffeine for marijuana and this makes a bit more sense to me.

> is one claim I am not familiar with (usually I hear “psychologically addictive”, like any pleasurable activity), but maybe I am out of date on the latest research.

That's because there is a lot of misinformation spread by stoner types that try to rationalize cannabis usage as "non-addictive". Speaking as a former stoner myself (with nothing against smoking, I just don't partake anymore).

Cannabis use can absolutely cause physical dependence. It can absolutely "cause" (be part of) psychological dependence. It can absolutely be part of a pattern of addiction. The idea that weed is "not addictive" is simply propaganda.

Now, it is true that when compared to drugs like benzodiazapenes, alcohol, and opioids, that cessation of long-term cannabis consumption causes much less severe side effects. You don't get seizures from stopping weed abruptly. But there are absolutely still withdrawal symptoms.

TL;DR: It's a myth that cannabis is a magic plant that one can't get addicted to. It's basically a cope put forward primarily by internet stoners.

How about limiting the use in shared public spaces? i.e. I don't want my kids see alcohol consumption in planes or trains (even tho I drink myself at home).

And gambling.

Gambling is one of these field where most people agree to regulate it, including the gambling companies, and it seems to be working decently well.

For instance mobile game gambling could have been way more rampant and destructive, but we have a decent set of rules and laws to limit the impact.

I can't imagine our society with 0 gambling happening, so if people will find a way anyway, I'd personally prefer it to be on the open, in a mainstream way. Blocking marketing wouldn't work when there are so many different forms of gambling, and obviously it also plays a social stabilizer role so I don't see any serious move to effectively stop people from gambling succeeding.

Not the easiest one to make absolute decisions over. National lotteries fund a lot of useful stuff.

National lotteries allow lower taxes, that is all. The same dollars could be raised by taxing people in a progressive way instead of via addictive gambling.

Gambling can ruin people's lives. The government shouldn't support it being easily accessible. It should be reserved for a desert city almost no one lives in on vacation.

I'm glad you brought the inconvenient truth up. Both the lottery and cigarette taxes are used to fund essential programs (schools, police, fire departments) guilt-free here in the states. If those were to be removed, we would be forced to hold a difficult conversation about taxation and how we would fund things from then on.

Although those things could be funded by something else instead (e.g. income or excise taxes)

Social media, too.