Banning cigarettes is protecting public health

No, it is forcing people to buy unregulated products from illegal dealers. That sounds more dangerous to me.

No one is forcing people to buy cigarettes.

People are going to buy cigarettes. You can play make-believe and pretend that isn't true. Or you can grapple with the uncomfortable reality.

In reality, people will be buying illegal, possibly tainted cigarettes that are sold by organized crime groups. Same as any drug.

Just wondering, do you support communism?

Ironically, as someone who’s been to a few communist countries, cigarettes are common, legal, and cheap. Micro managing people’s personal lives is an old school progressive philosophy that goes back to Prohibition, and before that, it was the Puritans.

Yes, I support a classless society without exploitation, where the humans own the means of production, democratically.

What would you do differently to solve the problem?

With 8% of NZ smoking and that number apparently falling, can you state the problem?

> She added that the legislation could close the life expectancy between Maori and non-Maori citizens. The overall smoking rate for Maori citizens is at 19.9% - down from last year's figure of 22.3%.

8% among general population but 19.9% among Maori.

Yes, the dark people can't look after themselves, we know better.

That link of thinking has always gone very well in the past.

And falling rapidly.

Could you point me to the numbers that suggest a rapid fall over time or are you implying it based on the change over the course of one year mentioned in the article?

The latter.

Lower tax revenues and tobacco profits?

For me, the only way to reduce smoking and drug usage is through education -- prohibitions just end up increasing the black market, violence and incarceration rates.

Educate educate educate. Don't even try to solve this within generation, this is something which need to be really through generations. Educate people how bad cigarettes are for them and others and you can use also soft propaganda as painting smokers as bad people in media etc instead straight up banning smoking, you can just make smoking extremely appalling.

There isn't a problem.

There is a huge problem.

Young people are still taking up smoking in large numbers.

It is not uniform: The children of smokers are much more likely to smoke.

I am unsure this is the correct approach, but the health and economic impacts are huge.

What problem?... that 8%?