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.
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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"yet another prohibition"
another American projecting their domestic nonsense onto the rest of the world
Most drugs are prohibited in most countries, throughout most of history.
You're thinking specifically of American alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. It is you who is projecting americanism.
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.
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.