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.
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.
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.
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?
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 ask an addict then yeah you'll get some gibberish that enables them whether it fits into a logical paradigm or not.
Reminder that slavery was legal.
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.
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.
It's basically taxing people for saving everybody else money.
Outcome: this will cost everyone a lot of money. Time to raise the retirement age to 80!
Tho that creates significant black market incentive.
Other option is only serving ultra light drinks (2.5% beer, cider, sangria or cocktail).
One could frame this as a substance regulation for anyone under 18, with the age moving one year every year henceforth.
What's heavily restricted is the sale and consumption in most public spaces.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those of us who don't smoke or vape can smell that shit a couple of hundred metres away.
But that doesn't sell nearly enough debt.
Have you considered just eating food?
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.
The they later enacted the War on Drugs. They still pump billions into cartels and the federal forces.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Congratulations!
Still a good idea to ban cigarettes and force people to consume their nicotine in healthier ways.
Hah, alcoholics have done more damage to my life than a smoker could ever dream of.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Second hand smoke, however, inflicts damage the moment it’s inhaled.
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.
Shows up consistently in A&E Hospital records, reportedly enough to identify weekends and phases of the moon.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> No, it's because being around a smoker is deeply unpleasant.
Being around drinkers isn't exactly a picnic :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And as a driver, I certainly want everyone around me to be required to properly maintain their cars.
(1) They have GPS tracking of all camera locations with alerts at each one
(2) They use laser jammers
(3) They have the best radar detectors
(4) They all know the best lawyers for getting your tickets dropped and failing that
(5) They know how to approach the prosecutor for diversions
The much better, safer, driver gets the ticket and higher rates instead because they haven't revolved their driving experience over defeating the ticketing enforcement. And the 'justice' system is good with this because the end goal is revenue, not identifying problem drivers.
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.
That's why smoking is already heavily regulated in order to limit and minimise the impact that your choice has on others.
This is how liberty works in a free society as mentioned in my previous comment.
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.
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.
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 what countries? Certainly none I've heard of.
Smokers are incredibly obnoxious. Smoking at a bus stop? Why not? Under open windows? Sure. On sidewalks, so that I have to breathe that stuff in when behind them? Sure.
What's that? Smoking at bus stops is banned? No problem — just move 5m away and smoke all you want, the wind carrying the smoke towards the bus stop all the same :)
And such laws are not realistically enforceable anyway.
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?
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.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
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.
A huge win for society
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.
Would you argue we should teach empower people to be more responsible and let them all own surface to air missiles?
Surely we should empower people to be healthy and make smart choices and let companies put arsenic in food to save money. Let people build homes with asbestos insulation because it’s cheap and works and let people connect their house to the gas main because it will encourage people to be resourceful ?
I’m all for encouraging people to make good choices, but the consequences are very obvious in certain circumstances.
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.
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.
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.