kersplooshCourt upholds town bylaw banning anyone born in 21st century from buying tobacco products
talRealistically, I assume that anyone who wants tobacco and would be affected is just going to buy it outside city limits.
remoteloveYep. My hometown restricted beer and wine sales and that is exactly what we did. It was a 15min drive instead of what could have been a 5min drive.
ikiddWe had a religious township do that, now the highway to the nearest wet town has the highest rate of drunkdriving deaths in the province.
TexasDrunkI lived in a dry county growing up. If someone was headed “across the bridge” it meant they were heading to the border of the next county where they had a bar and 4 liquor stores within a half mile stretch.
It’s weird that I grew up in a county that didn’t sell alcohol but there were more liquor stores within 10 miles than there were grocery stores.
Username checks out. Dry/wet town/county lines are a very common experience there
When you’re as drunk and Texan as I am you know where to go to get liquor.
It’s getting less prevalent. Last I heard my hometown is now wet and the closest town down the street serves beer at the only restaurant there. In the last 20 years things have started loosening up a little.
People will drive to county limits, but policies like this have been shown to actually be quite effective. Even if you are willing to drive to a neighboring county, will you do it as often?
ScubusNo, I’ll just stock up on more at once.
Psychadelligoatpolicies like this have been shown to actually be quite effective
United States, 1920s, alcohol.
Very much the opposite
That’s a very different scenario and it required committing crimes to drink. County-level policies like cigarette bans and sugar taxes have legal ways for you to bypass them, but still discourage use.
I grew up with these types of laws and they are just more of an inconvenience than anything else. My old hometown restricted the sale of beer and wine for many years, but it was easy enough just to go to the next town over. (Simultaneously, the town hosted a state managed liquor store which was extremely weird.)
If smaller communities want to restrict products like that, whatever. Hell, even restricting some services is OK as long as it’s not discrimination based.
Personally, I wouldn’t live in one of those places. It’s not about the tobacco but more about the people who are elected by those communities to make laws like that. If smaller communities of like-minded people want to make their own laws like that, so be it.
spyd3rPoliticians making smoking cool again with this one stupid trick.
Smoking is not good for your health, but we as Americans are free to make that choice for ourselves. I think that’s the definition of unconstitutional. Banning something like that is only going to make it more widespread and sketchy. Look at the war on drugs and what it’s done, but sure it’ll work this time.
I don’t think “unconstitutional” is the word you want here. There’s endless things you are not free to purchase or choose for yourself.
“Unconstitutional” == I don’t like it
Literally as deep as most people’s understanding goes.
It’s more like unconstitutional == government overreach
Also what language do you code in?
Not going to argue about whether or not it's constitutional (because I don't know), but I just wanted to point out that this case is slightly more complicated than just "you're not allowed to purchase". It's "you're not allowed to purchase.... BUT other people are". Which means it's potentially a question of discrimination, which is maybe not as cut-and-dry as a "normal" law banning a substance across the board.
Back to the old days of buying smokes out of some guy’s trunk.
CaptainEffortHonestly tho yeah, just look at prohibition.
That’s what I mean. As someone else pointed out, all it does is make it inconvenient, and it opens up a black market. People are gonna do what they want. Either this means they’ll just drive to another city/county/state, or someone is going to acquire them in bulk and sell them on black alleys.
In my mind, a more effective approach is to regulate where someone can smoke. There are a number of CA cities where it’s effectively illegal to smoke a cigarette within city limits (aside from private property), which drives smokers into little nooks and crannies. Ultimately most people want it out of sight and out of mind, and to not walk into a cloud of it on a sidewalk or have their children seeing/smelling it, which is 100% reasonable. But telling someone they’re not allowed to buy it is going to incentivize some to seek it out more.
Thank god i can gi back to buying individual smokes when i am hammered at the bar. Nothing worse than smoking a pack of cigarettes over the course of a week because i had a craving while drunk.
wrath_of_grungeThe cost of cigs is also artificially inflated in many places. I’m glad to see less of the younger crowd smoking, that’s a good thing. But doing it in these ways just feels plain un-American.
We let an awful lot of things that are bad for us slide, because the effects aren’t as visible.
This does seem super anti democratic. Banning things for only people of a specific group made up of people who were born into it is pretty gross no matter what it is. If it’s worth banning then it should be banned for everyone. Or no one.
The manufacturers are banned from selling to new markets.
Effectively banning something for a group of people who had no choice about being in that group.
All I'm reading is the government isn't banning the sale is a market that has already been exploited.
That’s a very weaseling way to describe it though. It may hold legal water, but you have to be willfully ignorant to not see how it’s banning a group of people buying something based on the group they were born into.
It should be banned for everyone. This exception is just allowing the businesses to wind down slowly.
Did I get a choice being in the group that these people marketed their poison to? What about my rights to have safe products available?
It's not anti democratic to make laws against harmful things. Specifically harmful things that make you quickly chemically dependent on it.
It’s not anti democratic to make laws against harmful things. Specifically harmful things that make you quickly chemically dependent on it.
I didn’t say it was. Banning only a specific group is what’s anti democratic.
Listen we already have age restrictions on different drugs, this is just progressively raising the age limit on a specific one.
The alternative is ban them outright, putting thousands of people immediately out of work, leave small businesses with thousands of dollars of garbage stock, and leave addicts without any supply.
Do you think that or continuing unrestricted sales are better options? Go cry more, stop advocating to flip the table.
You’re pleasant. That’s very tortured logic to avoid the obvious that they’re banning other people from using something that they aren’t willing to ban for themselves.
FredselfishThis is like Texas when they had dry counties. This didn’t stop people from drinking they just drove futher to buy it. This law is dumb they are now going lose tax dollars to the next towm over.
How do you stop a Mormon from drinking your alcohol?
Invite 2.
I don’t really know Mormons but for some reason I remember that joke.
I heard it a bit different: What’s the difference between Jews and Mormons? Jews don’t recognize Jesus as the messiah and Mormons don’t recognize each other in the liquor store. (I think it works with baptists too)
Yeah that the one I heard.
These are both dumb jokes.
proleDry counties still exist (outside of Texas at least).
It’s perfectly democratic; it is, however, horribly illiberal.
airdiThey already do this alcohol why not tobacco
They don’t do it for alcohol. Kids eventually become adults and old enough to make their own choices and decide to buy alcohol not. This law would ban people born too late from ever being allowed to buy.
This is a law banning current generations and all following them from the product. This isn’t your average, everyday prohibition.
Not sure if I’m for it or against it, but it is certainly something to pay attention to.
Alcohol has an age requirement that stays where it is, if you’re 20, you can buy it in a year. This would be if you’re 23 right now, the age requirement is 24. Next year, you’ll be 24 and the requirement is 25. In 50 years, you’ll be 74 and the requirement is 75, until eventually no one alive is old enough to smoke.
kirbowo808I understand banning something that’s basically super unhealthy and has direct links to cancer but at the same time, ppl have been smoking and consuming drugs/alcohol for centuries and by stopping ppl from doing it, it’s basically gonna encourage a new generation to try it.
If they’re gonna start banning things like this, then maybe they should also ban alcohol and talcum powder too since they also have links to cancer as well.
Things like this, ppl should be taught about the effects of drugs/cigarettes/alcohol in a safe environment, not just ban things cuz the law says otherwise. You can’t have a black/white approach to those things.
🔰Hurling⚜️Durling🔱Prohibition has never and will never work, and we have the data to prove it. However, these laws are made by people who want to go and say “I did a thing, re-elect me peasants!”
Is ot not just a ban on selling a product? People could grow tobacco, and roll their own.
I didn’t read the law, but from the article it looks like it is just a ban on the sale of the product, not personal choice to actually use tobacco.
Please for the love of God watch this before commenting some dumb shit about “it’s my right to expose everyone around me to airborne toxic materials!”
yeah, being exposed to cigarette smoke is not ideal.
my issue with this law is that it feels immensely inconsistent: cars, and guns kill a huge amount of people per year. likely more than cigarettes, but i can’t verify that rn.
Because then concern trolls like you will sealion about why we aren’t doing anything about cigarettes instead?
Ever think that those two things kill so much more because anti-smoke laws have been working?
jesus christ
Prepare thy goalpost, because cigarettes kill about 10 times as many as either of the other things
Cigarettes are responsible for about 480,000 deaths per year. Guns related deaths make up just over 48,000. And about 42,000 for vehicle related deaths.
Honestly, I’m quite surprised, I would’ve guessed that you were correct.
surprising!! thanks for looking it up my internet is painfully spotty rn.
totally agree about legislation.
Well you can throw in the other 800,000 deaths a year caused by the breathing in of car exhaust and you won’t be surprised any more. They kill more than just the pedestrians and other drivers.
As the other user pointed out, cigarettes kill far more Americans than cars or guns. I’m with you on the gun thing. But the car safety stats are always increasing because we do in fact put a huge amount of effort into them - from seat belt laws to firewalls to airbags to automatic braking… there’s too many to name. Now there’s the recent move of making them bigger, harder to stop, and with reduced visibility, so we might see those gains flatten out in the next half decade or so.
We’re also going to start to see a decline in cigarette related deaths as fewer and fewer are smoking them these days. There’s an intersection of public health messaging, government policies on age of access, taxes, and other efforts that are really starting to pay off. I think the e-cigarettes are also helping, but that’s a whole discussion of its own.
So cigarette related deaths are still pretty high, but it will start to fall off. I can’t remember the exact prediction but let’s just call it falling by half in the next decade. Cigarettes are deadly, but they take a long time to kill.
Smokers born in the 40s and 50s are the ones dying from things like cancer and heart disease today, and the replacement rate (new smokers versus loss from people quitting or dying) isn’t working in tobacco’s favor.
i was more referring to pedestrians.
Make smokig illegal in public (been done in many places) but legal in your own home, or at places FOR that purpose.
Like alcohol
Good.
Prohibition of cigarettes won’t work, at best people will just go across an imaginary line to buy cigs, at worst it creates an unregulated black market. Just look at how alcohol prohibition went and the current war on drugs is going. If you want to have any sort of meaningful impact on cigarettes create more sin taxes on the product so people will decide on their own to just not buy them.
Prohibition of cigarettes won’t work[:] at best people will just go across an imaginary line to buy cigs, [and] at worst it creates an unregulated black market.
Oh, I think it does worse than create an underground market.
But millennials won’t get tobacco HERE. Soon, maybe the next town will decide they won’t get them THERE. Think globally, act locally.
Seriously this will make cigarettes look cool and rebellious again to young kids, and guess who will have cigarettes? The same person who sells other illegal substances. Poof, you have now made cigarettes a gateway to cocaine, meth, heroine, and none of it is regulated so deaths from fentanyl just with have easier access to our youth.