Rishi Sunak considers banning cigarettes for next generation
Rishi Sunak is considering introducing some of the world’s toughest anti-smoking measures that would in effect ban the next generation from ever being able to buy cigarettes, the Guardian has learned....
In fairness, smoking tobacco is one of the few means of administration where outlawing makes sense. The overall societal cost is very high, even for non-smokers, as in second-hand smokers and cigarette butts littering. It’s one of the few substances that health experts often recommend to make as unattractive as possible, be it through taxation or law.
I don’t really mind vaping or heating that much, I’d be fine with making cigarettes illegal while keeping the alternatives. Unfortunately, latest legislation has imposed higher burdens on the latter while doing jack about smoking.
“the overall societal cost is high”
Just like every other drug. Everyone wants to legalise marijuana, ostensibly for the tax money (but not really), and yet it has far greater social costs than tax will recover. Even the states that legalise it (and consequently becoming tourist destinations) are not actually benefiting from it even though the “Las Vegas effect” means that they should disproportionately benefit from it.
So the fact that we already have one awful policy (legal tobacco) is not sufficient to justify implementing another one. Marijuana seems to have roughly the same or slightly lower impact on lung cancer as tobacco (hard to measure since most people smoke both). Of course it has other harder to measure effects like long-term brain damage, and DUI risk, or even loss of economic productivity and workplace accidents.
The US (and most of the world) has been triumphantly marching towards banning smoking and yet we seem to be normalising the use of another substance that isn’t any better. It seems likely that we will be in the same place with marijuana in a few decades as we are with tobacco.
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