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.
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.
Making it illegal to buy at certain ages has never worked...banning them outright also won't work. You cannot stop people from doing things, no matter how many words you put on paper.
Has the war on drugs not been a thought to these people? It is useless and does nothing.
I agree that prohibition doesn't really prevent a thing from being consumed. However, I don't think an age limit really counts as prohibition. Selling substances to those who are underage is bad and there should be potential consequences for doing so.
It's true, you can't stop people from doing what they want to do with laws, but smoking doesn't smear a child down the street for everyone to see. What a terrible comparison
Sure on a global scale, but on a more macro level, the war on drugs failed because people want to buy and consume drugs.... if there is no legal, regulated, safe method to buy them then the black market will fill that gap... same under rationing, same under prohibition, same with drugs and in the future cigarettes....!
Man the fuck up and outlaw it for everyone instead of this sneaky prohibition that only affect people that can't vote yet. It's such a cowardly, disingenuous way of doing it.
Prohibition never works, the best bet is to keep it legal and make it as inconvenient as possible like: raising taxes on tobacco, make it illegal to smoke outside of dedicated zones (Quebec has done it I believe), fine people who litter their cigarette butts (hard to implement but, it might deter a large majority from doing it), keep helping smokers to quit and keep raising awareness for younger people.
Nah the best bet is to remove the profit motive. And through legal means execute every cigarette company owner or employee who covered up health risks for mass manslaughter.
This method stops current smokers from being criminalised.
If you ban it like prohibition, you will instantaneously create a black market. Continually increasing the age you can buy cigarettes is easier. Everyone that this effects will not have the option to legally create a cigarette habit/addiction.
A straight up outlawing would have the maximum effect. But it would be costly to enforce, whilst increasing overall criminal activity.
They just need to outlaw the commercial production of cigarettes. I'm very anti cigarette personally, but at the end of the day, tobacco is a plant and should not be outlawed. But outlawing commercial products it makes tobacco legal and accessible to those who want it. With commercial cigarettes being less available, in guessing through either lack of convenience or lack of ability to act on an impulse, that the amount of smokers will drop.
The reason I used the word Prohibition is because I think it's bullshit either way. We're sitting here legalizing pot because Prohibition doesn't work, but somehow doing this chickenshit year-by-year outlawing is somehow going to fix something that education is doing a fine enough job. People are going to smoke cigarettes, there's always a group that will do it, legal or not. Whether you want a crime problem around it or not is the obvious question these chucklefucks don't seem to understand, despite repeated examples to the contrary.
No no no, minimum age should increase by 360 days every year, that way people can still have hope that some day they'll be able to smoke. Staying true to how capitalism works.
NZ already did this and it is the most cowardly way to avoid political blowback.
There's plenty of other options for minimising smoking. A more altruistic way is by lifting people out of poverty and tackling social disintegration, since smokers are overwhelmingly poor and disaffected.
Your right there are better ways. Both methods should be implemented. A carrot and stick approach is going to be more effective.
I don't think we can expect the altruistic way from a Billionaire Tory. As far as policy goes, this is the best one the Tory have had in a long time. But that doesn't say much.
So instead of reducing a clearly destructive habit now we should wait for a major social change that likely won't happen. I don't see how that is more altruistic for the "poor and disaffected".
You can either try to do things the right way and cure multiple social ills, or you can do it the wrong way and end up with different rules for different adults all in an attempt to prohibition your way out of one issue.
This is an amazing, for the sole reason that everyone who is 17 and change now will turn 18, be able to smoke, the law will bump to 19, they won't be allowed to smoke any more, but then they'll turn 19 and they'll be able to smoke again until the law raises to 20...
This is the better way to write the law of course, but the ham-fisted way it's proposed by Rishi would look more like what I wrote, because he said specifically that the age should rise one year every year.
It's directly related. Why are 18 year olds able to lock themselves into a 6 year contract that they might be killed before they see the end of, when they are, legally, too dumb to make their own decisions regarding a chemical they put in their bodies?
If this is the only effort, it's weak. Better to also (or instead) tax each box by another 20 pounds. Kids don't have that money. They'll find other things to do.
Vaping is a joke, they stuck the addictive chemical (nicotine) in it and now they are hooked on vaping. Let them sell vaping goods but they shouldn't be allowed to add nicotine to them.
It's already prohibitively taxed to be around £12-15 for a 20 pack. There are 4 corner stores within a 5 minute walk of my house that do them under the counter for a fiver, and you can bet they don't care about IDs either
Speaking at the Conservative party conference, Mr Sunak said he believed it was the right step to tackle the leading cause of preventable ill-health.
"Because without a significant change, thousands of children will start smoking in the coming years and have their lives cut short."
But Mr Sunak has decided to throw his backing behind it as a way of meeting the government's ambition for England to be smokefree by 2030 - defined as less than 5% of the population smoking.
The proposal on raising the age of sale of cigarettes is similar to laws being introduced in New Zealand, where buying tobacco products will remain banned for anyone born after 2008.
Mr Sunak also said the government would consider restricting the sale of disposable vapes and look at flavourings and packaging of the devices, to tackle the rising rates of children using them.
"If implemented, the prime minister will deserve great credit for putting the health of UK citizens ahead of the interests of the tobacco lobby."
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I agree that smoking is bad for you, having quit myself - but the idea of outlawing a plant / prohibiting humans who just happened to be born in one specific part of the world from burning it and inhaling the produced smoke just goes against my views on ethics.
Instead, why don't we fix the real problems? How about getting rid of capitalism, and thus the profit incentive to sell addictive substances for a huge markup? How about we fix this broken society that keeps pushing more and more people towards drugs such as nicotine, the tiny escape, and the little bit of stress relief they provide?
Drugs, from cigarettes to meth, are not the problem..
They're just a symptom.
The war on drugs is nothing more than an effort to sweep the real problems under the rug, and nothing less than coordinated violence targeted at people who are already suffering.
Because people have been more and more conditioned to obey year after year. To be absolute pushovers who never fight against the grain, never question groupthink, etc. Grandfathering the criminalization (using violent enforcement) of something like smoking a cigarette is a shining example of what's to come.
They want to look at how vaping is being marketed to kids to reduce the number starting to vape but they’re not changing the age restrictions as far as I know.
Hopefully this will lead to them just using vapes instead of cigarettes and not them trying to illegally get cigarettes. I'm still on the fence on whether I think this law is a good idea in general or not but allowing them to still buy vapes / vape liquid is definitely the right decision IMO.
They're doing a separate crusade against disposable vapes. If they're going after smoking I'd imagine they'd be trying to encourage people to vape to quit.
It's all hypothetical because it's highly unlikely he'll still be in power to put this plan in to action come the next general election
You could just as easily day "oh, ban asbestos? I guess we gotta save everybody from themselves, what a nanny state."
This is bad logic that can be applied to any safety law. As a society we observe and mitigate known harms, because we can't expect every citizen to be up to date on every possible way to harm themselves without realizing it or understanding the true scope of the damage being done.
So yes; sometimes as a society we decide to save ourselves from ourselves. There's nothing wrong with that.
The fuck are you talking about? There are all kinds of laws that make something legal or not based on someone's age, and they often vary by state or even locale. Hell, there's a minimum age for running for president for chryssake and it's well past any definition of adulthood.
What are you talking about? Plenty of laws discriminate based on age. Like, the minimum drinking age, the minimum voting age and the minimum age of consent
Still, and I mean no offense here, I still smoke because I want to and like to, knowing every danger it brings me I still have the right to do it to myself. Right of ones own body and all...
And for the healthcare part, I just did my part and paid more than will probably be needed myself in advance over the passed 20+ years... The only cost I will make by death from smoking will have come from my pocket when I was alive and still glad I could smoke. 😅
Also, don't get me wrong, I do agree you should not smoke among non-smokers, at least not physically, cause at that point a smoker is causing physical harm to someone that choses not to be harmed by it, I do get and hold myself to that. I also hate smokers that just smoke anywhere at anytime (my own mother, for example, will always eat small portions and immediately smoke at the table after, even though nobody else is finished), but that's just terrible manners or attitude and arguably does not origin from the fact they smoke, rather the other way around,...
I'm just not a fan of more rules with more reasons to become a criminal for doing mundane things. I get that we shouldn't endanger eachother with our behaviors, but full banning things eventually gets enforced to your home included, and you just know one day the cops will be showing up cause somebody saw a young looking person smoke through a home window, because "if it's illegal, it must be evil and stopped." and will also make it impossible for anyone under the rising barrier to ever be able to get help stopping when they want to, cause it'll forever get them in trouble admitting they do...
Either way, aside from the smoking, though, I also don't think it's a good idea to start introducing laws with a rising age-barrier,... History has shown us plenty of times it is not a very productive thing to separate groups of people for life according to a personal trait they didn't choose to have/be. 😕
Are you kidding? The government will dig themselves deeper into debt with or without it. Regardless, "I can't stop giving people cancer because otherwise it would cut into my profits" is a uniquely shitty thing to say.
Assuming that I go out and smoke among other people, which I don't. My pack is always safe at home when I'm out, only time I'd take it was when going out to parties (which I haven't done in many years) and even then I'd go stand separate to smoke.
Not everybody of a big group of people that have a similar action are therefor the same. Never good to generalize and treat people differently for 1 thing either...
It seems to me y'all have problems with people of a bad attitude. It's not so much that they smoke, but that they do it without respect... Doesn't every smoker doesn't have respect...