aside from the issue of ‘prohibition still doesn’t work’, i don’t think giving kids or “underage” adults criminal charges for cigarettes is making anything better for anyone

Smoking age is specifically the ability to purchase. There are no criminal/civil charges for underage smoking. The crimes are specifically 1) selling to minors 2) buying for minors.

TL;DR: No one goes/will go to jail for underage smoking. They won’t even get in trouble for buying. The onus is on the vendor OR the legal purchaser who handed them off.

Incorrect.

A black market is created, kids still smoke, but poor people making a buck selling to kids go to jail.

It doesn’t fix the issue and syphons poor people into prisons.

Prohibition laws do put people in prison.

“Noone goes to prison for underage smoking”. False. The people selling the cigarettes, poor people trying to make a buck, go to jail for the underage smoking.

I suggest we do nothing.

Prohibition doesn’t work.

Mind your own business.

You’re just being purposefully obtuse now.

No. The kids aren’t the ones going to prison, but the prohibition laws do send people to prison.

I would argue that society should reserve the right to punish individuals who harm others for their personal benefit.

And I would argue that selling a physically addictive substance that directly causes harm with no benefit to the user for personal profit is causing harm.

So while I don’t support arresting people for smoking, I 100% so support arresting people for selling.

Again, I just see mental gymnastics.

So you just outright said that people should be free to smoke, but anyone who sells what is being smoked should be incarcerated.

How is that not a complete oxymoron?

No. You have a factually flawed bias against a thing, and you want to mob up with other people to enforce your opinions and will upon people you disagree with.

As a result, you want to imprison poor people and not accomplish what you claim to want to accomplish.

poor people making a buck selling to kids go to jail

As they should

Happy you are for the siphoning of poor people to for profit prisons.

Really sounds like your plan to eradicate tobacco from existing is solid.

Works for pedophilia too.

How do you propose this black market gets created? In theory, no new addicts would get created because the smoking age rises in lockstep with the people themselves.

Yes, because no one has ever smoked before they reached the legal age.

They should raise the heroin age

There is already a black/gray marked near many schools (for the younger, there are cigarettes and for the older there is weed.) it’s a market where there is just one person selling, it is more a fluid market where the young people sell and buy to each other, mostly there are multiple kids with connections to get the goods in any school and then it rotates through the different kids by selling, buying, stealing etc. Source: I’m 26 now, and don’t believe that has changed since I left school.

Are you fucking with me right now?

You really have a surface-level understanding of how the world works, I take it.

General mindset of a standard prohibitionist.

I know this is pretty radical, but if we made smoking FFA way fewer people should theoretically start smoking in the first place. From my experience when I was still at school most of the people there were only smoking because it’s “cool”, making smoking legal for everyone should take the coolness factor away at least.

Please, oh dear god…

Please tell me what FFA means and how it doesn’t amount to “send poor people to prison”.

FFA just means “free for all” (it’s a term from competitive games, in case you shouldn’t know), in this context I used it as another word for ‘legal’.

Oh thank god.

Yes, I 100 percent agree with you. Your thought process is the way.

Sorry I was so adversarial in my first comment. A lot of the rest of this thread has me all sorts of triggered.

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