Health experts say axing plan to block sales of tobacco products to next generation will cost thousands of lives
Awful reason, but fuck these laws. Declaring a person forever disqualified from what other people will still be allowed to do is obviously not the same thing as ‘you must be 18.’ It is infuriating how many people pretend there’s no difference.
Ban smoking for everyone or don’t ban smoking. Trying to be “clever” about equality under the law is just fresh discrimination.
You want money? Tax the companies, not the customers. Take as much as you like. The alternative is, they don’t get to exist.
It makes perfect sense. Cigarettes are cancer death machines in an addictive package. They should be banned. However, we’ve learned from hard experience that making addictive drugs harder to get just leads to addicts trying even harder to get them. So what’s a practical solution? Grandfather in the current addicts and try like hell to keep everyone else away from it.
Equality doesn’t come in to this. You do not, in fact, need to protect people’s right to addictive cancer sticks.
As a human being with my own rule over my own body I have the right to do with it as I please.
If I want to consume addictive cancer sticks until I die a slow, painful death, I have the natural freedom to do so, and laws, taxes or fines won’t stop me until I’m really locked away.
So I support other peoples freedom to smoke. It is just inhaling smoke from burning plant matter, which may be an irrational choice, but is my choice.
If you do that, then you should also forfeit your right to use publicly funded hospitals that already struggle enough with people suffering of conditions they did not ask for voluntarily. Smoking is not just a cost for your body, but for society as a whole, hence the justification in a ban
Motivation is irrelevant - this kind of law is intolerable.
You wanna limit it to current users? Say that. Have a national registry of whoever’s bought them before, and if they stop for six months, they’re off the list. Treat it like a progressive opioid program where the government supplies them directly by mail, if they fill out some preachy postcards.
Age limits are only legitimate because of physiological differences. A 12-year-old cannot be trusted the same way as a 22-year-old. But today’s 22-year-olds are no different from next year’s 22-year-olds. Or the next, or the next. Declaring some of them unfit is worse than baseless age discrimination. It is creating second-class citizens, forever barred from… whatever.
Allowing bad precedent for good reason would create tremendous problems later. People would propose all kinds of exclusionary bullshit, where old people get to do stuff forever and young people never will, and they’d excuse it by saying ‘well you allowed it for smoking.’
If you think that’d never happen - I will remind you this law was defeated by assholes who think more people should smoke. So they can funnel more wealth to the wealthy. Good faith and sensible governance do not need more obstacles.
Nope. @Landsharkgun is right. Zealand already has some of the highest tobacco taxes in the world. Tobacco is incredibly expensive here.
What happens is the addicts spend all their money on insanely expensive tobacco and their kids go hungry.
These laws came after years and years of rising prices, massive taxation, plain packs with disgusting health warnings, free nicotine patches and free gum for anyone who wants to quit.
It has been working too. Our smoking rates are way down.
I’m really disappointed that we did the hard yards on this and now these turkeys are going to dismantle over a decade’s worth of work and bring a whole new generation into lung cancer land.
Considering that nicotine isn’t the harmful part of smoking, the amendment they had about greatly reducing how huch nicotine a cigarette was allowed to have would have been a pretty stupid move, turning people into chain smokers.
People aren’t literally addicted to the habit of smoking, they’re physically addicted to nicotine. It’s pretty much unavoidable. Any smoker who tells you they just like the ritual, has been conditioned to think that by mentally associating the ritual with relief from the physical symptoms of nicotine withdrawal.
Sure, removing the nicotine isn’t going to be an immediate barrier from continuing smoking. But the point is that once the person can no longer get nicotine from smoking, they will almost certainly make the decision to quit themselves. And that has the potential to be a more profound decision for them than simply having the product taken off the shelves and being told they can’t have it.
They aren’t removing all the nicotine. They were just cutting down how much each cigarette has. So for a smoker to get their nicotine fix, they’d have to smoke three times as many cigarettes.
“Their fix” is based on whatever dosage they’re already used to. There’s not some fixed upper bound that everyone achieves after their first cigarette.
Making cigarettes less addictive would make new addicts less addicted.
It’s still tobacco at the end of the day, you can’t remove all of the nicotine because it occurs naturally. It occurs in many other plants too, but in levels which doesn’t inspire any motivation to remove it. In the same way I think delineating between elimination and reduction of nicotine is a moot point. Smoking is not pleasant, and every smoker has overcome this unpleasantness to become nicotine addicts. There is no reason other than nicotine why it continues to propagate in all countries and cultures today. And with nicotine-reduced cigarettes, smokers must simultaneously engage with that unpleasantness more, and still come to terms with diminished returns vs. the nicotine they previously ingested from 1 cigarette.
As for the amount the nicotine can be reduced by, I’ve seen a wide range of estimates from 50% to 90+%. I don’t think we’ll ever really know what’s reasonable and scalable without any such product actually on the market.
Nicotine is addictive and harmful to your health. It restricts blood to the brain, narrows arteries, and causes blood clots. https://www.echelon.health/nicotine-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ there are benefits to nicotine too but they don’t it as a prescription drug because of the drawbacks.
Seems like a good thing to me. Let people decide for themselves, it’s not the government’s job to tell them what they can and can’t put in their body.
Agree with this. All the pro weed and pro other drug people need to realize they are making the opposite argument to support banning smoking. All substances carry some intrinsic risk and the externalities must be managed, but its up to consenting adults to make their own choices about what they will consume.
I’m surprised Lemmy has this take. Why is it anyone else’s right to take your right to smoking away?
I don’t mind taking away the right for my son to smoke cancer sticks. Much like I wouldn’t mind making Russian roulette illegal.
Perhaps it’s not the right to harm ones self that’s the issue. Should you have the right to manufacture, sell, and profit from harm to others? Be it environmental, oral health, lung health, or heart health, cigarettes are a net negative to any citizenry. Seems in a governments best interest to try and greatly reduce and/or eliminate this leech.
I’m sure you’re fighting against marijuana legalization then to improve public health too.
Smoking is awful, disgusting, and through the diseases it causes puts a massive burden on the healthcare system… buuuut, educational campaigns to encourage people to stop and limiting it in media/banning advertisements is definitely the way to go over yet another prohibition law.
“yet another prohibition”
another American projecting their domestic nonsense onto the rest of the world
Education means doing nothing. It literally is the status quo which we know does not work.
educational campaigns to encourage people to stop and limiting it in media/banning advertisements is definitely the way to go
I don’t really understand why you think New Zealand hasn’t already done that. It banned all tobacco advertising decades ago. Including shops have to keep them out of sight and no signs.
Starting from the 1990s tobacco had to have gruesome pictures of diseased lungs, rotting diabetic toes, etc all over it, and health warnings.
Then they banned companies from using their own fonts, colours or logos and standardised it. Then they made the warnings take up all the pack.
Modern tobacco packs in New Zealand look like this and costs two hours’ wages for just one packet.
There are gruesome PSAs about it as well.
Unfortunately it’s highly addictive and it kills people.
