There are two separate issues here: 1. will this work (will the UK stop smoking) 2. is this something the UK government should be doing
Setting aside 1 and looking at 2, it seems silly to me to point out that other things (alcohol) that cause problems and are not being restricted. You take the wins where you find them, and the government isn't a magical force that can impose its will on the people arbitrarily. This is obviously the government responding to the general sense of the people (perhaps putting its thumb on the scale). The UK doesn't support cigarettes, so the law gets passed. If someone has a public opinion poll there showing less than 50% support for this, I'd love to see it.
> other things (alcohol) that cause problems and are not being restricted
Alcohol is heavily restricted, though. You can't sell it to minors, younger minors can't drink it in public, you can't sell/buy/make it above a certain proof, you can only resell it from authorized distributors, it is taxes, and so on.
Sure, banning cigarettes for a specific generation is a much more stringent restriction, but plenty of other restrictions exist.
>> the government isn't a magical force that can impose its will on the people arbitrarily
You must live in a democracy. If you ever lived in a country where the government curtailed freedoms by fiat, you'd understand that it can and it will. I happened to be living in Vietnam when the government just randomly decided one day that smoking would be banned everywhere, effective immediately. You might think that's simply putting a thumb on the scale; but you also haven't tried to visit the New York Times website from there and later found yourself in a room with officials asking for all your passwords. And clearly you're not familiar with the preferred way of clearing traffic jams, which is driving a jeep through a crowd of motorbikes while a guy with a long bamboo cane whacks anyone who's in the way.
Thumb on the scale my ass. Totalitarianism is control over the little things.
My suspicion is that alcohol is mind-altering in ways smoking is not, and has a large effect on social interactions in business and romance and coping with the drudgery of daily life.
Take away smoking from the next generation and they move to caffeine or vapes. Take away alcohol and there are revolutions and religious extremist revivals.
From the government's perspective, this may (or may not) be silly.
But putting that aside, if a citizen supports banning cigarettes for people born after a certain date, but not alcohol, that certainly seems hypocritical to me.
>But putting that aside, if a citizen supports banning cigarettes for people born after a certain date, but not alcohol, that certainly seems hypocritical to me.
Why does everyone on HN seem to have a hate boner for alcohol? The main problem there is car culture, not the alcohol.
In any case, the hypocritical part is where the UK, like many US states, has legalized marijuana for medical use and is well on its way to legalizing it for recreational use. Pipe tobacco at least smelled good. Cigarettes, not so much. But marijuana smells like a mix of stale cigarettes and body odor. AND the second hand smoke isn't just harmful, it can make you high along with the dirty smelling marijuana smoker. At least with nicotine, it sharpens your concentration. THC on the other hand makes you a lazy Cheeto eating couch potato with no future.
I think there is a reasonable argument to be made that they're a different degree of societal problem. I think there's quite a few people who drink on special occasions, but not every week or even every month (I'm one of them).
I think it's very rare though for a smoker to not smoke several a day. A friend of mine was that rare breed and would buy a 10 pack occasionally - usually on a Friday and it'd be gone by Monday - but that would maybe be once a month. I think every other smoker I've met though goes through that amount every day.
So it seems to me the average smoker is much more likely to become a burden on a nationalised health service than the average drinker. There's more to this of course, smoking to excess generally doesn't increase the chances of you getting into a fight like drinking does for some people, but social pressure counters that partially too.
Don't forget gambling. Though given that the gambling lobby were the only donor's to Starmer's leadership campaign that out-donated the pro-Israel lobbyists, I wouldn't bet on them doing something about it. Pun intended.
Edit: just realised I posted under the wrong comment. Doh.
Incremental change isn't a thing? Focusing on one health area, which will certainly be a massive undertaking, instead of trying to wipe out all unhealthy things at the same time?
I think it is also part of a trend. More and more control over people's lives, more and more bans.
Beyond whether something is "bad for you", the key aspect in a free society is whether the State should decide for you (we're entrusted with the right to vote, after all).
Demolition Man has turned out to be the most accurate prediction of the future regarding those issues among all the 90s movies. Quite interesting.
I see smoking as a separate category owing to the existence of second hand smoke. Smoking in a room with other people adversely affects those people. I think government is the correct body to be intervening in that scenario.
What mechanisms do you foresee for it to fail? If stores stop selling cigarettes, the UK will have no other choice but to stop smoking them. I wonder what will come to replace them though. People have a peculiar tendency of forming addictive habits.
Regarding question 2, personally, I am uncomfortable with the idea of a nanny state.
Is weed legal in the UK? Do people still smoke it?
This might play right into the hands of bootleggers and gangs but also into the Swedish / American nicotine pouch industry which is basically marketing straight at kids.
Also - vapes. Most folks don’t smoke cigarettes anymore. How does this control vaping?
As a former smoker (who quit for seven years and regrets taking it up again), and as a present-day vape user, wtf. This is a clear restriction on liberty. It may be stupid that I do it. Just like many stupid decisions (junk food included), it ought to be my right to decide how to live.
Cut off production so cigarettes are no longer made or imported. Don't block me from them while letting others have them. (Not in UK)
It'd be kinda funny to see an early 1900s / USA-style mafia / gangster resurgence of bootleggers over cigs in the UK. Much lower stakes, but black markets are a thing.
The title is hyperbolic. It isn't a ban on smoking. It's a "ban on buying cigarettes." Commerce is being restricted, not consumption. If, presumably, you bring your own in from France, or someone bums one to you, it would appear you're free to smoke it.
That broadly seems to strike a fair balance. Banning purchases and sales, not possession or consumption.
OK, so if you smoke you don't get national / socialized health care but don't have to pay the taxes that fund it either. Deal. It's enough to convince me to take up smoking.
> This is a clear restriction on liberty. ... Just like many stupid decisions (junk food included), it ought to be my right to decide how to live.
I guess that liberty was plenty abused on every non-smoker in a non-smoking area, that ended up coughing in clouds of smoke anyway. Smoking affects everyone around you whether you want it or not, and while you may smoke for 50 years and end up being perfectly healthy, some may get cancer from it, even for a very small dose.
There's already some pretty comprehensive bans on smoking in places where it could affect other people. I don't really encounter cigarette smoke in my day-to-day life.
I think that a government should be able to ban murdering people but that it would very sketchy for them to ban it for some people and not others.
One of the most important foundations of democracy is that the law applies to everyone equally. If smoking is banned, it should be banned for everyone, not banned for some people and allowed for a privileged class who got here first.
It's a restriction on liberty but not an unjustified one. I agree that it gives cigarettes a "mystique" that they do not deserve to have one generation able to smoke if they like while another generation has to go outside the law to do so.
When I was a smoker, I used to decry places that were less liberal about where I was allowed to smoke, and places with high taxes. As a former smoker, I know that the high taxes have enabled a lot of people to stop, and the restrictions got to a point where smoking was less "cool" and more "pariah" behavior. These influences helped me stop.
If you didn't read "The Easy Way to Stop Smoking", go do so, and smoke/vape no more.
If everyone appreciated how little value they receive from tobacco/nicotine and how easy it really is to quit, there would be no market.
It's sad that the UK, which invented liberal philosophy, is increasingly accepting of paternalism. It's important that people have an inviolable personal sphere inside which they can live their lies as they see fit. That includes making decisions of which society disaproves.
Moreover, essentially all behavior plausibly has "diffuse negative externalities". We should be very careful about adopting that ("harms others in diffuse ways") as a reasonable standard for banning some behavior.
The real answer would be to ban all commercial cultivation and sales, but keep personal consumption legal. It's the multi-billion dollar tobacco industry that systematically hooks people through advertising, not the plant. Something tells me not many folks will be growing tobacco plants in their basement to get a fix.
I didn't find anything particular, but in general it should apply to anyone under the jurisdiction. I think it's illegal to drink underage in the US, even if the person is a tourist and they are allowed to drink by their own country's law.
Why not just get your nicotine fix via one of the handful of other delivery methods which are not banned? Or just find a local black market doggie hookup, same as you would for any other illegal substance?
If you’re a pothead who can’t make it through your day without a smoke, then god knows you’ll find a connect - and if you’re addicted to cigarettes, I’m pretty sure you won’t have much trouble getting your fix.
Can anyone attest if young people are actually taking up cigarettes again? I was talking with a friend that teaches teenagers and she was explaining how many students that once were getting in trouble for vaping/pouches have now turned on to cigarettes. Completely boggles my mind - I thought the newer generation had a much stronger aversion to physical cigarettes.
Just from my subjective view and observation, I'd say yes. It feels like a lot more people (younger than 30 roughly) smoke more than people around my peer group (mid 30s).
I could be totally wrong tho, but at least that's what it feels like. It feels like "all of them" smoke. Either vape or real cigarettes and quite a few of them using cigarettes
I’d say cocaine is the upper class drug of choice. Regardless, alcohol is every classes drug of choice. The debate over whether the government is hypocritical or not kind of ignores the reality that British voters don’t want alcohol banned. So the government isn’t going to ban it. Which is broadly what you’d want a government to do!
They ban buying cigarettes, not nicotine in general, correct?
In that case, I would compare it to making catalytic converters mandatory in new cars in the 1970s.
You still can pickup nicotine consumption, but with xx % less carcinogens :)
The cigarette lobbyists are not what they used to be. A pack is £15+ of mostly tax, beige green colour, and has gruesome health warning images. They "let" all that happen.
I assume all the ones who were young enough to have worked tobacco at its peak are now working for Meta, OpenAI or Flutter.
The real story may be that even despite heavy lobbying, they are trying to do something that has the potential to benefit the population, with the added benefit of reducing some of the load on health care system caused by this.
As we know, smoking can cause lots of problems, including for babies if the mother smokes during pregnancy.
I don't necessarily have a problem with it, but this is just stealth micro-pensions. Expect tobacco purchases by Gen-X'ers and Millenials to skyrocket over the next few decades.
This is good and all, but they should probably also restrict the advertising of nicotine products in this country. Coming here from the states, I was astounded that you can advertise Zyn like nicotine pouches in tube stations and around in public.
People should have the right to make bad decisions, because with a population of millions of individuals you can not accurately decide what is a bad decision and what is just a less bad decision.
Drinking has been decided to be totally fine though, no need to ban that - probably because it's unfashionable to smoke, and the kind of people who come up with these laws find it uncouth. It will also be ridiculous in a few years when the UK inevitably decides to legalise marijuana - totally fine to smoke a joint, but don't you dare put any of that tobacco in it!
Drinking doesn’t affect others as direct as smoking does.
Most of the indoor smoking bans in the U.S. have been based entirely on the fact that second hand smoke affects the employees who are forced to be there.
Further, drinking has a far deeper cultural resonance, so smoking is clearly the lower hanging fruit.
And it’s not like the UK has not been taking action against drinking. For example, they’ve imposed minimum alcohol taxes which have been directly linked to lower consumption.
Drinking affects others much more than smoking does, it's just that it doesn't affect random strangers. In a study of the harms of various substances, alcohol came out on top by a mile for the damage it does to the family and others close to the drinker.
I should qualify the above: it doesn't affect random strangers as often as second-hand smoke does. But drunk driving and drunk violence are a thing, and both can affect anyone.
I think these laws are bizarre morality rituals. Evidence doesn't conclude it has anything to do with public health when you see how vicious alcohol is.
Nobody was ever attacked on the street by a tobacco-addled stranger at 3 in the morning though. Besides, they're not banning indoor smoking, they're banning it entirely - including vaping and other nicotine products.
That cuts down on drinking, except for the alcoholics of course. Scotland also imposed a minimum price per unit on alcohol, in an attempt to further cut consumption:
Right. Booze is straight up naturally occurring, albeit rare. That's why you get drunk monkeys and other wildlife. The animal is like "Actually this moldy fruit is pretty good" - they did absolutely nothing to manufacture booze but here it is.
They're not banning smoking in general (which would be impossible anyway, what are they going to do, make it illegal to set something on fire and breathe it in?), they're banning nicotine products. I also really doubt that they will legalise weed and then say "but of course you're not allowed to smoke it, edibles only".
This is dumb. Brazil was able to extremely reduce tobacco consumption “just” with education and banning advertising.
It blows my mind how no other country in the world wants to follow their example on this. Are they too proud to copy a third world country? Even when it’s doing some things better?
People have been smoking tobacco for 12,000 years. How about nanny states fuck off and let people do what they want with their body. I would be happy for regulation of additives that tobacco companies adulterate their products with, but I should be able to smoke any plant I want.
Are they going to continue selling cigarettes and vapes for people born before that date. I've always found the career as a prohibition smuggler a somewhat romantic notion so at some point I may be able to take it up.
In a few years, they'll realize that the savings from public health care now requires an an even higher amount of money poured into the police, customs and justice systems to enforce it. Because suddenly, there are these weirdos trying to sell it in dark places. Who could anticipate that?
But that's for another government to deal with, of course. Not our problem. Oh, and the future government will be happy to announce they are giving funding that will go to new jobs!
I propose a ban on people that use bans as a brain-less cheap way of fixing complex issues.
This lack of social consensus is the problem here. A national referendum would be better, as it provides a way to force people to consider the changes and decide.
I think that banning smoking in public places makes sense because you are impacting other people. I think banning things for kids makes sense because it’s a big wide world and it’s our duty to protect them. I’m not a fan of banning the things that a grown adult can do when it only affects them personally, however much I despise smoking. Since when have people decided that giving up personal liberty is fine. If you want to look 15 years older with gross teeth, horrible smell and die at 60, it’s kind of up to you.
Although much less harmful than smoke, nicotine is still not harmless to the cardiovascular system. If the goal is public health, it makes sense to move the needle a little further and try to keep people off nicotine entirely.
Alcohol is another story, we're not ready to remove that yet.
After alcohol, are we going to stop people from having multiple sexual partners in their lifetime? Because if public health is the goal, that would solve a lot of problems.
It is fine to attempt to improve public health, but not at the cost of giving people a life worth living.
I wonder what the cost/benefit analysis is for different addressable health outcomes. For example, under this justification could a government mandate a restricted calorie diet or enforce daily resistance training?
There are all kinds of activities/behaviors whose costs are socialized: obesity, driving, sitting around all day/not exercising, living in suburbs, gambling, engaging in sports (broken bones cost society!). That's kind of the point of a society though - to pay for socialized costs. If the goal is to make every individual pay for the consequences of their own decisions what's the point of public healthcare or insurance in general?
I completely disagree. Obviously people individually want to smoke - nicotine makes them feel good! - and there's a good chance they would vote to preserve that "right," but smoking is bad for society and we would unambiguously be better off if it didn't exist.
One of the principal jobs of government is to stand for the good of the collective against individual selfishness.
<sarcasm>
Oh yeah, banning people who can't vote yet, genius.
I think next we should ban them from eating butter, and you know, riding mountain bikes. Just protecting them you know.
What about us? Oh us, we're addicted, so... Well, you just can't take that away from us, can you? I mean there would be riots. But the kids, they wouldn't know what they're missing, right?
</sarcasm>
This is such a weird law. I doubt this would be constitutional in France. You can't just pass a law that affects some people but not others. It's against the principle of equality.
You can kind of tell when people think about only themselves or the community when they present arguments for things like smoking and vaccination.
"I don't want to be controlled" is a perfectly valid argument, and I prefer humans can make choices for themselves and have reasonable autonomy when it does not have a negative affect on others.
Vaccination and smoking affects people around you. Drinking does too - in certain cases, but much less directly, in most cases. For example, drinking and operating vehicles is already illegal. Drinking and punching someone is already illegal!
Is taking concepts to logical extremes a good way to govern?
(No.)
But are you saying we don't care if things have negative effect on people? If we go to extremes, well then obviously everyone should have 100% autonomy? Oops that doesn't work.
So, this is the hard part - you have to find balance, compromise, a reasonable middle ground. That's always going to be the hard part. Not black or white, but the grey areas.
Kinda pointless the government looking muscular on this when the real issue has moved on anyway to vaping, access to weed etc. The industry lobbying wont come after the govt anyway so no blocks right, as they are getting profit from elsewhere
This is insanely dumb. Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you. So if people want to do it anyway who cares. I understand the cafe and indoor space bans but not allowing anyone to do it seems stupid. I don’t smoke but UK has really gone off the deep end recently with social controls, what is the point?
When they came for the smokers, I did not care, because I was not a smoker.
There's a general trend of trying to "optimize" society to remove all ills, and once you apply that logic, there's no clear stopping point. Once you ban sale of tobacco products, you can use that same logic to ban anything, from Cheetos to skydiving to motorcycles.
Natural consequence of socialized medicine. If I’m paying for your healthcare then I (and by extension the state) get a say in basically every aspect of your life.
Time to ban alcohol, marijuana, Tylenol, fatty foods, sugar, candles, campfires, fireworks, food coloring, bicycles, playgrounds, cars, cell phones, and anything else that might be harmful
Let us look at the cancer survival rates in the US vs countries with socialized medicine. I know for a fact when the business elite of my Euro country gets cancer they fly to NY. They don't pay taxes either tho so I guess it works for them.
The other natural consequence of socialized medicine is rationing. In Canada the waiting time for treatment is often months or years[1]. That GoFundMe might give you a higher survival rate.
Funding the "biggest threat the UK ever faced" according to Phil Mykytiuk, who has spent a decade mapping tobacco crime gangs in the north of England with a customer base of 10-11 million potential customers and rising every year, will surely cut heavily into their profits…
It gets tiresome to buy a new house every week because the dry wall is full with cash, again.
"Yo, psst, want to buy some Lucky Strikes? You know what will go really well with that? This white widow super cheese, and if you feel tired I also got some soap for you, first line on the house." "You’re afraid your parents might smell it? I can get you a discount on this perfume, smells like Aventus but way cheaper."
-
"Mykytiuk, though, believes the multiple layers of crime behind cheap, illegal tobacco are escaping scrutiny, allowing crime gangs – emboldened by the lack of deterrent – to expand their power base right under the noses of enforcement.
Having witnessed Kurdish tobacco gang members invest heavily in property and high street businesses here in the UK, he’s now seeing evidence of them moving into cannabis farms.
“But forget drugs,” he says. “Drugs are yesterday. The big thing is tobacco. These gangs are becoming the most capable criminals in this country. Right now it’s the biggest threat we’ve ever faced.”
> He is new in post as a trading standards manager at Bolton Council in Greater Manchester but worked for 10 years on a tobacco enforcement team at nearby Rochdale Council.
Props to this Vice reporter (in 2022) for snagging an interview with a municipal staffer in a suburb of Manchester, I guess. I’m sure he’s a very busy man. But he doesn’t exactly seem notable (try Googling his name) and I’m not really sure what this is supposed to prove in the absence of any corroborating reporting.
If I got you right, you’re doubting his credibility as a source after he was vetted by a journalist, because he is talking about organised crime openly and not having a website or a Substack with half a million followers?
There are two separate issues here: 1. will this work (will the UK stop smoking) 2. is this something the UK government should be doing
Setting aside 1 and looking at 2, it seems silly to me to point out that other things (alcohol) that cause problems and are not being restricted. You take the wins where you find them, and the government isn't a magical force that can impose its will on the people arbitrarily. This is obviously the government responding to the general sense of the people (perhaps putting its thumb on the scale). The UK doesn't support cigarettes, so the law gets passed. If someone has a public opinion poll there showing less than 50% support for this, I'd love to see it.
> other things (alcohol) that cause problems and are not being restricted
Alcohol is heavily restricted, though. You can't sell it to minors, younger minors can't drink it in public, you can't sell/buy/make it above a certain proof, you can only resell it from authorized distributors, it is taxes, and so on.
Sure, banning cigarettes for a specific generation is a much more stringent restriction, but plenty of other restrictions exist.
Big difference between banning something outright and regulating a substance.
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what if they told you your kids would never be allowed to have a drink?
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>> the government isn't a magical force that can impose its will on the people arbitrarily
You must live in a democracy. If you ever lived in a country where the government curtailed freedoms by fiat, you'd understand that it can and it will. I happened to be living in Vietnam when the government just randomly decided one day that smoking would be banned everywhere, effective immediately. You might think that's simply putting a thumb on the scale; but you also haven't tried to visit the New York Times website from there and later found yourself in a room with officials asking for all your passwords. And clearly you're not familiar with the preferred way of clearing traffic jams, which is driving a jeep through a crowd of motorbikes while a guy with a long bamboo cane whacks anyone who's in the way.
Thumb on the scale my ass. Totalitarianism is control over the little things.
Is it possible to buy nicotine in Vietnam today? Is it de jure illegal but de facto widely available? Did everyone switch from cigarettes to vapes?
This seems really out of context
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Cigarettes are not incorporated into the UK culture the way alcohol is. Drinking at a pub is sacred to them.
My suspicion is that alcohol is mind-altering in ways smoking is not, and has a large effect on social interactions in business and romance and coping with the drudgery of daily life.
Take away smoking from the next generation and they move to caffeine or vapes. Take away alcohol and there are revolutions and religious extremist revivals.
Taking away smoking still solves the secondhand smoke issue.
From the government's perspective, this may (or may not) be silly.
But putting that aside, if a citizen supports banning cigarettes for people born after a certain date, but not alcohol, that certainly seems hypocritical to me.
>But putting that aside, if a citizen supports banning cigarettes for people born after a certain date, but not alcohol, that certainly seems hypocritical to me.
Why does everyone on HN seem to have a hate boner for alcohol? The main problem there is car culture, not the alcohol.
In any case, the hypocritical part is where the UK, like many US states, has legalized marijuana for medical use and is well on its way to legalizing it for recreational use. Pipe tobacco at least smelled good. Cigarettes, not so much. But marijuana smells like a mix of stale cigarettes and body odor. AND the second hand smoke isn't just harmful, it can make you high along with the dirty smelling marijuana smoker. At least with nicotine, it sharpens your concentration. THC on the other hand makes you a lazy Cheeto eating couch potato with no future.
I think there is a reasonable argument to be made that they're a different degree of societal problem. I think there's quite a few people who drink on special occasions, but not every week or even every month (I'm one of them).
I think it's very rare though for a smoker to not smoke several a day. A friend of mine was that rare breed and would buy a 10 pack occasionally - usually on a Friday and it'd be gone by Monday - but that would maybe be once a month. I think every other smoker I've met though goes through that amount every day.
So it seems to me the average smoker is much more likely to become a burden on a nationalised health service than the average drinker. There's more to this of course, smoking to excess generally doesn't increase the chances of you getting into a fight like drinking does for some people, but social pressure counters that partially too.
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A minority of people who drink are addicted to alcohol.
Basically everyone who smokes/etc is addicted to nicotine.
They aren't the same at all.
Sure, maybe, arguably. Does it matter though? A world without smoking is still better than a world with smoking, right?
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Don't forget gambling. Though given that the gambling lobby were the only donor's to Starmer's leadership campaign that out-donated the pro-Israel lobbyists, I wouldn't bet on them doing something about it. Pun intended.
Edit: just realised I posted under the wrong comment. Doh.
We know the dangers of second hand smoke. Someone drinking near you does not impact your health.
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Incremental change isn't a thing? Focusing on one health area, which will certainly be a massive undertaking, instead of trying to wipe out all unhealthy things at the same time?
I think it is also part of a trend. More and more control over people's lives, more and more bans.
Beyond whether something is "bad for you", the key aspect in a free society is whether the State should decide for you (we're entrusted with the right to vote, after all).
Demolition Man has turned out to be the most accurate prediction of the future regarding those issues among all the 90s movies. Quite interesting.
I see smoking as a separate category owing to the existence of second hand smoke. Smoking in a room with other people adversely affects those people. I think government is the correct body to be intervening in that scenario.
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> 1. will this work (will the UK stop smoking)
What mechanisms do you foresee for it to fail? If stores stop selling cigarettes, the UK will have no other choice but to stop smoking them. I wonder what will come to replace them though. People have a peculiar tendency of forming addictive habits.
Regarding question 2, personally, I am uncomfortable with the idea of a nanny state.
Prohibition did fail and US had to revert ban on alcohol.
The rules are made by politicians.
All it takes to change the rules is to rotate politicians.
Or enough public dissent that the same politicians are forced to revert the rules.
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Is weed legal in the UK? Do people still smoke it?
This might play right into the hands of bootleggers and gangs but also into the Swedish / American nicotine pouch industry which is basically marketing straight at kids.
Also - vapes. Most folks don’t smoke cigarettes anymore. How does this control vaping?
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Right, because it totally worked with drugs. People just don't use them anymore. Weed is impossible to come by nowadays.
As a former smoker (who quit for seven years and regrets taking it up again), and as a present-day vape user, wtf. This is a clear restriction on liberty. It may be stupid that I do it. Just like many stupid decisions (junk food included), it ought to be my right to decide how to live.
Cut off production so cigarettes are no longer made or imported. Don't block me from them while letting others have them. (Not in UK)
It'd be kinda funny to see an early 1900s / USA-style mafia / gangster resurgence of bootleggers over cigs in the UK. Much lower stakes, but black markets are a thing.
Edit: added "while letting others have them"
> wtf. This is a clear restriction on liberty
The title is hyperbolic. It isn't a ban on smoking. It's a "ban on buying cigarettes." Commerce is being restricted, not consumption. If, presumably, you bring your own in from France, or someone bums one to you, it would appear you're free to smoke it.
That broadly seems to strike a fair balance. Banning purchases and sales, not possession or consumption.
In a country with a national health system, why should you be able to internalize the benefit of smoking whilst externalizing the cost?
You could use this logic to ban unhealthy foods, or restrict people from eating too much.
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> In a country with a national health system
I live in the USA where we are treated like crap by our system of government. I'd agree with you if we had national healthcare.
pigouvian taxes are both a stronger disincentive and help cover externalized costs.
if this moves nicotine to the black market then the people/government will still pay the cost without receiving any taxes on it at all
The sin taxes more than cover the healthcare costs of the associated sins. It's the untaxed sins, greed and sloth, that are fucking the NHS.
OK, so if you smoke you don't get national / socialized health care but don't have to pay the taxes that fund it either. Deal. It's enough to convince me to take up smoking.
> This is a clear restriction on liberty. ... Just like many stupid decisions (junk food included), it ought to be my right to decide how to live.
I guess that liberty was plenty abused on every non-smoker in a non-smoking area, that ended up coughing in clouds of smoke anyway. Smoking affects everyone around you whether you want it or not, and while you may smoke for 50 years and end up being perfectly healthy, some may get cancer from it, even for a very small dose.
There's already some pretty comprehensive bans on smoking in places where it could affect other people. I don't really encounter cigarette smoke in my day-to-day life.
>This is a clear restriction on liberty.
So is banning the sale of leaded gasoline.
A restriction on liberty? For a britbong? What a surprise.
Kinda like being in a country where nobody born past a certain date can ever be a citizen.
Unless their ancestors were already citizens beforehand.
Which I guess could be considered a more generous concession.
> "it ought to be my right to decide how to live"
"Why is the government stopping me from murdering people and stealing from them? it's my right to decide how I live!"
I think that a government should be able to ban murdering people but that it would very sketchy for them to ban it for some people and not others.
One of the most important foundations of democracy is that the law applies to everyone equally. If smoking is banned, it should be banned for everyone, not banned for some people and allowed for a privileged class who got here first.
This is a great argument. Let's use it to ban sugar and meat.
It's a restriction on liberty but not an unjustified one. I agree that it gives cigarettes a "mystique" that they do not deserve to have one generation able to smoke if they like while another generation has to go outside the law to do so.
When I was a smoker, I used to decry places that were less liberal about where I was allowed to smoke, and places with high taxes. As a former smoker, I know that the high taxes have enabled a lot of people to stop, and the restrictions got to a point where smoking was less "cool" and more "pariah" behavior. These influences helped me stop.
If you didn't read "The Easy Way to Stop Smoking", go do so, and smoke/vape no more.
If everyone appreciated how little value they receive from tobacco/nicotine and how easy it really is to quit, there would be no market.
It's sad that the UK, which invented liberal philosophy, is increasingly accepting of paternalism. It's important that people have an inviolable personal sphere inside which they can live their lies as they see fit. That includes making decisions of which society disaproves.
Moreover, essentially all behavior plausibly has "diffuse negative externalities". We should be very careful about adopting that ("harms others in diffuse ways") as a reasonable standard for banning some behavior.
The real answer would be to ban all commercial cultivation and sales, but keep personal consumption legal. It's the multi-billion dollar tobacco industry that systematically hooks people through advertising, not the plant. Something tells me not many folks will be growing tobacco plants in their basement to get a fix.
History has shown prohibition can be… problematic.
Just tax it very very heavily and apply education / social pressure?
What about tourists and foreigners? Most smokers can't go more than a few hours without smoking... This will surely lead to a large black market.
They can bring it with them.
The law (as proposed) restricts sales and giving to someone else, not the smoking itself.
https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/60034/documents/628...
Will this market be significant? This would surely affect a very small percentage of visitors.
22% of the global population are smokers according to Wikipedia. It's probably lower for younger generations but still significant.
I didn't find anything particular, but in general it should apply to anyone under the jurisdiction. I think it's illegal to drink underage in the US, even if the person is a tourist and they are allowed to drink by their own country's law.
Easy: anyone who cannot submit to the law of a country should not go there.
It will probably be a bit of both: a large black market and a decline in foreign visitors, international conferences, and similar events.
Why not just get your nicotine fix via one of the handful of other delivery methods which are not banned? Or just find a local black market doggie hookup, same as you would for any other illegal substance?
If you’re a pothead who can’t make it through your day without a smoke, then god knows you’ll find a connect - and if you’re addicted to cigarettes, I’m pretty sure you won’t have much trouble getting your fix.
Can anyone attest if young people are actually taking up cigarettes again? I was talking with a friend that teaches teenagers and she was explaining how many students that once were getting in trouble for vaping/pouches have now turned on to cigarettes. Completely boggles my mind - I thought the newer generation had a much stronger aversion to physical cigarettes.
Just from my subjective view and observation, I'd say yes. It feels like a lot more people (younger than 30 roughly) smoke more than people around my peer group (mid 30s).
I could be totally wrong tho, but at least that's what it feels like. It feels like "all of them" smoke. Either vape or real cigarettes and quite a few of them using cigarettes
"Ah, smoking is not good for you, and it's been deemed that anything not good for you is bad; hence, illegal" — Demolition Man, 1993
Alcohol costs the UK 4-5x more than smoking. Coincidentally, it's the upper classes drug of choice. Must be a coincidence though
I’d say cocaine is the upper class drug of choice. Regardless, alcohol is every classes drug of choice. The debate over whether the government is hypocritical or not kind of ignores the reality that British voters don’t want alcohol banned. So the government isn’t going to ban it. Which is broadly what you’d want a government to do!
As the US found out, alcohol is very very hard to ban because it is very very easy to make.
Weed and tobacco are also very easy to make. They literally grow on trees[1].
[1] Technically, herbaceous plants.
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At least alcohol produces side effects that people enjoy. Smoking pretty much only has negative side effects once you get hooked.
Sitting in a room with someone drinking doesn't give you cancer.
Just ban smoking indoors then
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They ban buying cigarettes, not nicotine in general, correct? In that case, I would compare it to making catalytic converters mandatory in new cars in the 1970s.
You still can pickup nicotine consumption, but with xx % less carcinogens :)
Im curious how the industry allowed this. Seems like a tremendous amount of lobbying money would oppose it. There must be real story there, somewhere.
Are you in America? I only ask because this mindset, that lobbyists are capable of squashing any law they dislike, is not internationally universal.
Not to say lobbyists don’t have an effect in the UK, they do. But the US has a particularly egregious setup.
The cigarette lobbyists are not what they used to be. A pack is £15+ of mostly tax, beige green colour, and has gruesome health warning images. They "let" all that happen.
I assume all the ones who were young enough to have worked tobacco at its peak are now working for Meta, OpenAI or Flutter.
Only in America, where markets magically solve all issues.
The real story may be that even despite heavy lobbying, they are trying to do something that has the potential to benefit the population, with the added benefit of reducing some of the load on health care system caused by this.
As we know, smoking can cause lots of problems, including for babies if the mother smokes during pregnancy.
this
I don't necessarily have a problem with it, but this is just stealth micro-pensions. Expect tobacco purchases by Gen-X'ers and Millenials to skyrocket over the next few decades.
This is good and all, but they should probably also restrict the advertising of nicotine products in this country. Coming here from the states, I was astounded that you can advertise Zyn like nicotine pouches in tube stations and around in public.
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People should have the right to make bad decisions, because with a population of millions of individuals you can not accurately decide what is a bad decision and what is just a less bad decision.
Drinking has been decided to be totally fine though, no need to ban that - probably because it's unfashionable to smoke, and the kind of people who come up with these laws find it uncouth. It will also be ridiculous in a few years when the UK inevitably decides to legalise marijuana - totally fine to smoke a joint, but don't you dare put any of that tobacco in it!
Drinking doesn’t affect others as direct as smoking does.
Most of the indoor smoking bans in the U.S. have been based entirely on the fact that second hand smoke affects the employees who are forced to be there.
Further, drinking has a far deeper cultural resonance, so smoking is clearly the lower hanging fruit.
And it’s not like the UK has not been taking action against drinking. For example, they’ve imposed minimum alcohol taxes which have been directly linked to lower consumption.
Drinking affects others much more than smoking does, it's just that it doesn't affect random strangers. In a study of the harms of various substances, alcohol came out on top by a mile for the damage it does to the family and others close to the drinker.
I should qualify the above: it doesn't affect random strangers as often as second-hand smoke does. But drunk driving and drunk violence are a thing, and both can affect anyone.
"Ranked by drug experts on damage to user, impact on crime, and socioeconomic effects"
1. Alcohol 2. Heroin 3. Crack Cocaine 4. Cocaine 5. Tobacco
I think these laws are bizarre morality rituals. Evidence doesn't conclude it has anything to do with public health when you see how vicious alcohol is.
Nobody was ever attacked on the street by a tobacco-addled stranger at 3 in the morning though. Besides, they're not banning indoor smoking, they're banning it entirely - including vaping and other nicotine products.
Prohibition (of alcohol) wouldn't work, but over time the government has raised alcohol duty rates:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/alcohol-duty-rates
That cuts down on drinking, except for the alcoholics of course. Scotland also imposed a minimum price per unit on alcohol, in an attempt to further cut consumption:
https://www.gov.scot/policies/alcohol-and-drugs/minimum-unit...
Whether that works is an open question, but in the UK things like "the sugar tax" have a visible affect on consumer consumption rates of "bad things".
Nicotine is insanely addictive, so ya.
Alcohol is very difficult to ban as you can take almost any kind of sugar feedstock and turn it into alcohol.
Right. Booze is straight up naturally occurring, albeit rare. That's why you get drunk monkeys and other wildlife. The animal is like "Actually this moldy fruit is pretty good" - they did absolutely nothing to manufacture booze but here it is.
Newsflash: Its possible to consume "marijuana" w/o smoking it (just like nicotine!).
They're not banning smoking in general (which would be impossible anyway, what are they going to do, make it illegal to set something on fire and breathe it in?), they're banning nicotine products. I also really doubt that they will legalise weed and then say "but of course you're not allowed to smoke it, edibles only".
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Drinking has been declining on its own.
If anything, I think it will only increase the number of young people smoking.
This is dumb. Brazil was able to extremely reduce tobacco consumption “just” with education and banning advertising.
It blows my mind how no other country in the world wants to follow their example on this. Are they too proud to copy a third world country? Even when it’s doing some things better?
People have been smoking tobacco for 12,000 years. How about nanny states fuck off and let people do what they want with their body. I would be happy for regulation of additives that tobacco companies adulterate their products with, but I should be able to smoke any plant I want.
Are they going to continue selling cigarettes and vapes for people born before that date. I've always found the career as a prohibition smuggler a somewhat romantic notion so at some point I may be able to take it up.
Ah yes, smuggling lung cancer. How romantic.
In a few years, they'll realize that the savings from public health care now requires an an even higher amount of money poured into the police, customs and justice systems to enforce it. Because suddenly, there are these weirdos trying to sell it in dark places. Who could anticipate that?
But that's for another government to deal with, of course. Not our problem. Oh, and the future government will be happy to announce they are giving funding that will go to new jobs!
I propose a ban on people that use bans as a brain-less cheap way of fixing complex issues.
> an even higher amount of money poured into the police
Given the massive cost smoking imposes on the health sector, I find it hard to believe that's remotely possible.
2B if you tease the reality out of the oft misreported figure, and the annual rake from smoking is 8-10B so it is profitable to maintain it.
This enforcement costs argument is wrong. The point is not to enforce such a ban, it's to signal where the collective consensus is.
I've been accosted outside enough shops to buy underage smokers a pack of cigs to know how well this will work.
This lack of social consensus is the problem here. A national referendum would be better, as it provides a way to force people to consider the changes and decide.
I think that banning smoking in public places makes sense because you are impacting other people. I think banning things for kids makes sense because it’s a big wide world and it’s our duty to protect them. I’m not a fan of banning the things that a grown adult can do when it only affects them personally, however much I despise smoking. Since when have people decided that giving up personal liberty is fine. If you want to look 15 years older with gross teeth, horrible smell and die at 60, it’s kind of up to you.
Hopefully vaping will still be legal? They do distinguish the difference between inhaling burnt matter vs inhaling a heated aerosol, yes?
Of course not. The only thing government and private enterprise seems good at these days is taking things away from people. Logic be damned.
Although much less harmful than smoke, nicotine is still not harmless to the cardiovascular system. If the goal is public health, it makes sense to move the needle a little further and try to keep people off nicotine entirely.
Alcohol is another story, we're not ready to remove that yet.
After alcohol, are we going to stop people from having multiple sexual partners in their lifetime? Because if public health is the goal, that would solve a lot of problems.
It is fine to attempt to improve public health, but not at the cost of giving people a life worth living.
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I think it’s the combination of health impact and addiction
UK has public/socialized healthcare.
If you are a smoker, you are much more likely to be a burden on this system.
Makes sense to ban these types of activities if the costs of them are socialized rather than individualized.
If the cost of having socialised healthcare is so severe maybe we should stop socialising healthcare before we start banning risky activities.
I wonder what the cost/benefit analysis is for different addressable health outcomes. For example, under this justification could a government mandate a restricted calorie diet or enforce daily resistance training?
There are all kinds of activities/behaviors whose costs are socialized: obesity, driving, sitting around all day/not exercising, living in suburbs, gambling, engaging in sports (broken bones cost society!). That's kind of the point of a society though - to pay for socialized costs. If the goal is to make every individual pay for the consequences of their own decisions what's the point of public healthcare or insurance in general?
Do they plan to introduce social media ban as well for people born after 2010?
A ban for people born before 2010 would be reasonable
This is the kind of action that really requires a referendum.
I completely disagree. Obviously people individually want to smoke - nicotine makes them feel good! - and there's a good chance they would vote to preserve that "right," but smoking is bad for society and we would unambiguously be better off if it didn't exist.
One of the principal jobs of government is to stand for the good of the collective against individual selfishness.
<sarcasm> Oh yeah, banning people who can't vote yet, genius.
I think next we should ban them from eating butter, and you know, riding mountain bikes. Just protecting them you know.
What about us? Oh us, we're addicted, so... Well, you just can't take that away from us, can you? I mean there would be riots. But the kids, they wouldn't know what they're missing, right?
</sarcasm>
This is such a weird law. I doubt this would be constitutional in France. You can't just pass a law that affects some people but not others. It's against the principle of equality.
next thing you know they'll also ban murder for people born after 2008
UK becomes the safest country in the world, peace forever
Murder is one of the first things that most governments ban.
You can kind of tell when people think about only themselves or the community when they present arguments for things like smoking and vaccination.
"I don't want to be controlled" is a perfectly valid argument, and I prefer humans can make choices for themselves and have reasonable autonomy when it does not have a negative affect on others.
Vaccination and smoking affects people around you. Drinking does too - in certain cases, but much less directly, in most cases. For example, drinking and operating vehicles is already illegal. Drinking and punching someone is already illegal!
> I prefer humans can make choices for themselves and have reasonable autonomy when it does not have a negative affect on others.
How far do you want to take this? Your choice of diet may have a negative effect on others by way of having to pay for additional medical care.
Is taking concepts to logical extremes a good way to govern?
(No.)
But are you saying we don't care if things have negative effect on people? If we go to extremes, well then obviously everyone should have 100% autonomy? Oops that doesn't work.
So, this is the hard part - you have to find balance, compromise, a reasonable middle ground. That's always going to be the hard part. Not black or white, but the grey areas.
You're not going far enough. We need to mandate exercise.
Kinda pointless the government looking muscular on this when the real issue has moved on anyway to vaping, access to weed etc. The industry lobbying wont come after the govt anyway so no blocks right, as they are getting profit from elsewhere
This is insanely dumb. Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you. So if people want to do it anyway who cares. I understand the cafe and indoor space bans but not allowing anyone to do it seems stupid. I don’t smoke but UK has really gone off the deep end recently with social controls, what is the point?
I, a non-smoker, would like to not walk through clouds of smoke.
When they came for the smokers, I did not care, because I was not a smoker.
There's a general trend of trying to "optimize" society to remove all ills, and once you apply that logic, there's no clear stopping point. Once you ban sale of tobacco products, you can use that same logic to ban anything, from Cheetos to skydiving to motorcycles.
That's what I say when I breathe car exhaust. Why cannot all combustion engines be removed from society for my health preference?
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It's insanely dumb in the same way prohibition was insanely dumb in the US during the twenties.
> So [...] who cares.
I do. I prefer people not to get lung cancer, among other afflications. And for no benefit that I can think of.
I don't live in the UK, but I say: good to them, and boo to you, for your misanthropic attitude.
i this context, "who cares" means "whose business". and the answer by the western society is that no ones but person in question.
bucketing ppl by birth year is literally a discrimination.
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Heroin is bad as well and it's forbidden on account of that.
"My body, some distant governments choice"
Someone is not learning from history.
Natural consequence of socialized medicine. If I’m paying for your healthcare then I (and by extension the state) get a say in basically every aspect of your life.
Time to ban alcohol, marijuana, Tylenol, fatty foods, sugar, candles, campfires, fireworks, food coloring, bicycles, playgrounds, cars, cell phones, and anything else that might be harmful
Tylenol is much less dangerous than, say, Advil. It’s only issue is one of overdose which is common to all drugs.
> Natural consequence of socialized medicine.
improved health outcomes?
In the UK tobacco is heavily taxed and those taxes bring in more money than the cost on the healthcare service.
You can not put a price on human suffering.
Interesting - do you have a link about the financial accounting around this?
Enjoy setting up a GoFundMe if you ever get cancer.
Let us look at the cancer survival rates in the US vs countries with socialized medicine. I know for a fact when the business elite of my Euro country gets cancer they fly to NY. They don't pay taxes either tho so I guess it works for them.
The other natural consequence of socialized medicine is rationing. In Canada the waiting time for treatment is often months or years[1]. That GoFundMe might give you a higher survival rate.
[1] https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/article/more-than-23000-canadi...
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That will for sure go well.
Funding the "biggest threat the UK ever faced" according to Phil Mykytiuk, who has spent a decade mapping tobacco crime gangs in the north of England with a customer base of 10-11 million potential customers and rising every year, will surely cut heavily into their profits…
It gets tiresome to buy a new house every week because the dry wall is full with cash, again.
"Yo, psst, want to buy some Lucky Strikes? You know what will go really well with that? This white widow super cheese, and if you feel tired I also got some soap for you, first line on the house." "You’re afraid your parents might smell it? I can get you a discount on this perfume, smells like Aventus but way cheaper."
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"Mykytiuk, though, believes the multiple layers of crime behind cheap, illegal tobacco are escaping scrutiny, allowing crime gangs – emboldened by the lack of deterrent – to expand their power base right under the noses of enforcement.
Having witnessed Kurdish tobacco gang members invest heavily in property and high street businesses here in the UK, he’s now seeing evidence of them moving into cannabis farms.
“But forget drugs,” he says. “Drugs are yesterday. The big thing is tobacco. These gangs are becoming the most capable criminals in this country. Right now it’s the biggest threat we’ve ever faced.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/criminal-gangs-are-making-bi...
> He is new in post as a trading standards manager at Bolton Council in Greater Manchester but worked for 10 years on a tobacco enforcement team at nearby Rochdale Council.
Props to this Vice reporter (in 2022) for snagging an interview with a municipal staffer in a suburb of Manchester, I guess. I’m sure he’s a very busy man. But he doesn’t exactly seem notable (try Googling his name) and I’m not really sure what this is supposed to prove in the absence of any corroborating reporting.
I am interested in your thought process.
If I got you right, you’re doubting his credibility as a source after he was vetted by a journalist, because he is talking about organised crime openly and not having a website or a Substack with half a million followers?
Maybe the BBC from November last year is a more credible source for you? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0mx99ple17o
I hate how British people say "agreed" as if it implies "was" and "to". And lots of other things it implies, such as who, when and why.
How do you feel about the word "okay"? The word can mean anything. Must drive you nuts.
I think it's short for "agreed upon"
Well they're English, they invented the language. I don't know why they're trampling on it.
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