Comment by gcanyon
7 hours ago
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.
Alcohol is quite different to cigarettes. It's fun and part of the culture - most people drink and the country is full of pubs and restaurants serving it. You couldn't ban it without most of the country, including me, objecting.
Cigarettes on the other hand are not so popular. If you ask most smokers if they regret starting about 90% say yes. They mostly want to quit but are addicted. Quite different from booze.
If you look at the US about 50% have ever smoked some form of tobacco at least once. Only 11-15% currently do.
For booze it's much 'worse.' Nearly 80% have ever drunk alcohol but 50% of them still do. A much higher rate of ongoing use.
Also note a very large portion of people that have ever smoked have had a nice cigar or pipe, smoked once in a blue moon is extremely unlikely to cause cancer or addiction.
> 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.
> Big difference between banning something outright and regulating a substance
One could frame this as a substance regulation for anyone under 18, with the age moving one year every year henceforth.
what if they told you your kids would never be allowed to have a drink?
I'd probably start learning how to homebrew beer.
Sounds good to me...
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Awesome! Where can I sign?
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I’m having a hard time coming up with a better way. Simply banning all manufacturing and import is not going to work when it’s heavily addictive. In the case of alcohol, quitting cold can kill you.
Banning it today and expecting people to cope, or attempt to fund recovery efforts for a whole nation would completely misunderstand the addicts mind. If you don’t want to quit, you never will.
Instead we have a total ban that is timeboxed to allow the addicts the rest of their lives to quit one way or another.
If they wanted to ban cigarettes, they should have banned cigarettes. The whole "let's pass a law that only affects people who can't vote" strategy applied here is tyranical.
The US did the same thing with cockfighting. It was already illegal in all the states, but they passed a federal law binding on all states and territories to stop Puerto Ricans (who had no such law against it), who have no meaningful federal representation.
>> 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
They appear to have taken a specific reference to "the (UK (implied by context)) government" as an arbitrary generic reference to any government on the planet.
Cigarettes are not incorporated into the UK culture the way alcohol is. Drinking at a pub is sacred to them.
People used to be able to smoke in pubs. But I agree it wasn't quite so culturally foundational.
I'm not going to lose sleep over the idea of a smoking ban, since it was already driven to the margins, but the implementation of it by age is really weird. Clearly a move to avoid annoying pensioners, like everything else.
It makes sense to me, we're talking about a highly addictive psychoactive substance. It's much harder to get out of addiction than not get addicted in the first place, and people born after 2008 did not have a legal way to get addicted yet. That's exactly how I'd approach having a transition period to not cause unnecessary suffering in the process.
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.
Not the second-hand vape issue though.
Those of us who don't smoke or vape can smell that shit a couple of hundred metres away.
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.
Smoking is already banned in public spaces and workplaces. It's pretty rare to be in a room with someone smoking unless they're friends or family.
I think health costs are the bigger issue
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That's not a separate category, that's the general principle in a free society: There is a limit to "doing what you want" when it impacts others/imposes on them.
That's why smoking is already heavily regulated in order to limit and minimise the impact that your choice has on others.
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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.
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.
Smoking may be a burden on the healthcare system, but the effects of alcohol are a burden to everyone due to the resulting erratic and often directly destructive behavior.
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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?
A world without hypocrisy would be better still.
And a world where the government tells you what to eat, what to drink, and how much to exercise under penalty of jail is the best of all worlds!
Perhaps. The viability of that aside, I would rather attempt to create that world with things like education rather than the government mandating it. That tends not to work out as intended.
[dead]
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.
With all due respect, this is completely wrong.
There is a difference that someone smoking nearby automatically harms people around you. With alcohol, the effect is more unpredictable, but it is equally real.
Alcohol is a factor in an automobile crashes, and a factor in a significant proportion of violent crime, especially domestic violence (https://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/09/17/mark-kleiman/taxatio... edit: this source isn't as great, Kleiman has written elsewhere about the subject, but google is failing me). If we could wave a magic wand and cause drinking to cease to exist, many lives would be saved.
Note: I do in fact drink, I am not a teetotaler. But what I said above is factual. I personally believe that prohibition would be worse, and it's reasonable for individuals to make their own choices. But that does not entail denying that it goes very badly for many.
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If you just ignore alcohol fueled violence, birth defects, deaths from drivers hitting people and cars and the emotional health toll to others from dealing with an alcoholic, sure.
iirc alcohol is the drug with the highest amount of 3rd party harm due to the high number of people beating their spouse, children and sometimes random strangers under the influence. (+ 3rd party property, car crashes, ...) Keep in mind this was evaluated with current laws, which bans most kinds of indoor-smoking.
Still a good idea to ban cigarettes and force people to consume their nicotine in healthier ways.
I know at least one hacker news reader who didn't grow up with an alcoholic parent.
Congratulations!
Grow up with an alcoholic parent then get back to us
That is, until that person gets behind the wheel or on a (motor)bike and impacts you - and with that, your health - directly.
Having said that I don't like the nanny society which acts like it knows better. People sometimes want to do stupid things and I think they should be able to do so. They should also not burden society with the consequences of their stupid actions so smokers either pay in more for health insurance or get relegated to the bottom tier - e.g. "palliative care for smoking-induced illnesses, no life-extending treatments for smoking-related diseases". No smoking where it impacts others negatively - this includes minors living in their house - but if they want to smoke where it doesn't impact others just let them do it.
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You've probably never been out on a Friday night in the Uk.
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It doesn't? That should be good news for victims of drunk driving, and the families of abusive drunks.
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> Someone drinking near you does not impact your health.
Hah, alcoholics have done more damage to my life than a smoker could ever dream of.
>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.
> Why does everyone on HN seem to have a hate boner for alcohol? The main problem there is car culture, not the alcohol.
I don't really see how car culture has anything to do with stuff like domestic violence, child abuse, or various other side-effects of alcohol culture.
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?
> 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.
A smoking ban could easily be enforced by allowing anyone bothered by secondhand smoke to report it.
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?
There is a big difference between weed and tobacco.
I am a fairly regular weed smoker. I used to grow my own. I used to smoke tobacco. I can go weeks, months and even years without smoking weed. Kicking my nicotine habit took many, many, many tries and I didn't even enjoy it! They are not the same.
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That's exactly what this is. The money has moved on to pouches and vapes.
It's like how everyone pat themselves on the back for banning child labor after the industrial revolution had rendered it obsolete outside a few niches that weren't economically important enough to put up a real fight.
Politicians "win" by pandering to voters and interests. So this is an obvious move since they can pander to all those people who grew up being told a cigarette takes a minute off your life while only pissing off some niche industry and a few smokers who are unwilling to vape.
Right, because it totally worked with drugs. People just don't use them anymore. Weed is impossible to come by nowadays.