Out of context!
Cigarettes won’t be illegal like Heroin or Cocaine!
Apply the same to alcohol or petrol.
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Bollocks!
Have you seen what they include in those stupid stats?
And you accused me of missing the point 
whilst i agree with your side of the debate, the biggest issue i see looming (its here in australia) is the illegal tobacco industry…
a criminal syndicate cant sell 90kmh, but it can seel cigarettes…
theres precedence as well, hollywood gets very nostalgic, but prohibition pretty much gave rise to the american mafia and the scrouge it was/is… (despite some pretty fucking cool films)
so you may end up with a siuation which mimicks harder drugs, whereby its not taxed and criminal organisations reap the benefits of the profits, but the public purse has to pick up the health crisis left behind.
it sounds good in theory, there are reasons that theres a push for legalising harder drugs than tobacco though…
so the real question isnt whether its unfair for Johnny to buy smokes when hes 40, and what it means to his liberty, but more, whats the plan when the inevitable happens?
There is no debate, no-one is arguing that young people should somehow be discouraged from smoking.
Just him being, well him.
Imagine a gang of labourers on the site, and at lunchtime one of them goes on the sandwich run.
Old Jim says get me a cheese & onion sandwich, and pick me up 20 cigs as well.
I can’t get you them, I’m only 41.
So Government Policy should be formulated to prevent building site banter?
Jesus, you really are a massive hypocrite
I suppose what it comes down to is whether you think the progressive ban will dive fags underground.
Personally I think it won’t. A total ban ( like Dane suggested) would certainly, because you would instantly be cutting off the supply to a load of adults who are already addicted.
This plan is far less likely to result in that because it would go a long way into preventing people getting addicted in the first place.
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I’m trying to understand your point.
I think I understand that you are trying to create scenarios to demonstrate the absurdity of a situation where a 40 year old can’t buy fags, but a 45 year old can.
But what I don’t understand is why we should care that Old Jim has to go and buy his own fags? It’s certainly not any kind of argument against the legislation. It might feel a bit weird, but does that really hold weight against the potential to create a smoke free generation?
I think you are missing the main issue here which is that a society in the year 2050 where nobody can legally smoke under the age of forty, will have a very different attitude towards smoking than we do today.
We’ve had forty years of escalating prohibition on smoking, and that’s had a huge impact on how we view smoking and smokers. When I was a kid, people would come to your house and light up. They wouldn’t ask and they wouldn’t apologise. They would just start smoking. You didn’t tell them to stop. You gave them an ashtray
Right now we still tolerate smoking to a small degree. In twenty years it will be less tolerated, especially in nobody under the age of forty is smoking. I reckon Old Jim will know better than to ask a colleague to buy him fags. We don’t what kind of taboo that will be. There may well not be a cigarette industry full stop.
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its fucked up because of humans.
we’ve had a generational ‘war’ on cigareetes for all the right reasons, when the math way back when pointed purely towards keeping that industry going, massive anti smoking campaigns, prices rises, education of the results…
and what do we do…
(in melbourne) theres an underground tobacco war for a multi million/billion dollar industry, and, we get a growing trend towards inhaling manufactured chemicals…
it does feel right to work towards zero amount of people smoking, but you just know its gonna end up with an underground industry, less money in the coffers to support the health industry, and a latest fad of some ‘yet to be banned’ chemical being made ‘streetwise’…
i personally think it will.
rising immigration from countries with more liberal smoking laws, mixed with lower cost cigarettes, mixed with it affecting an admiteddly smaller population size…its ripe for an underworld.
where i do agree with you, is you wont have little johnny going into nan and pops for a sleepover as they chain smoke in the front lounge, a lounge where you could almost scrap the tar off the ceiling …and that has to be a positive…
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Cigarettes aren’t like other drugs in that they don’t make you high. The pleasure of smoking tobacco is only the pleasure of satisfying the craving caused by smoking it in the first place. Once you start it’s hard to stop, but there’s no real reason to start. That’s why tne tobacco industry spent so much time and money persuading young people that it was cool to smoke.
A black market would only be there for those who are already smokers and who don’t have the strength to give up.
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I am sure there has been some sort of cost benefit analysis, but I think it’s a myth that the revenues from smoking offset the damage to public health. Smoking costs the country a lot more than the taxation brings in.
Even if smoking is driven underground, you probably end up with far fewer people smoking that it would cost the country to such a degree that the NHS struggles without the revenue it brings in. 10% of the country smoke now. That’s some drain on the Health Service. What drain does Heroin have? I guess nowhere near as much.
This is a separate and much more pernicious problem
Or just cool to smoke cigarettes. It is rare to see a young person smoking a pipe. And snuff is now largely the stuff of Victorian novels. Neither are illegal.
Young people are generally drawn towards vapes anyway, partly because they are made more palatable and partly because they are much more unregulated. Some of the advertisements for vapes resemble tobacco advertisements from the 1960s.
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Umm, if an MP had been kidnapped, I doubt the first that we hear of it would be 5 months after the incident and only due to misuse of campaigne funds. Something here smells a bit off
Lets face it all it will do is increase the demand for illegal drugs and in particular cocaine, but that’s all right as you can buy that at any age because it’s illegal.
Just seems wierd to me. The crack downs on freedom are just going far to far imo.
Nonsense!
I was listening to “The Rest Is Entertainment” podcast which is Richard Osman (Weakest Link etc) and Marina Hyde (the humorous Guardian journalist) talking about entertainment matters (TV, Film etc). I would recommend it if you are into that sort of thing as Osman’s insider knowledge as a TV producer is fascinating.
Anyway, on this weeks show they were talking about a survey which matches people’s TV viewing with their voting intention. Overall, it seems to indicate that people are swinging towards Labour regardless of what they watch but a few of the details are interesting.
Labour voters tend to like things like Taskmaster, Big Brother and RuPaul’s Dragrace. These tend to have a young demographic.
Tory voters tended to watch I’m a Celeb and Strictly Come Dancing. That was tied into an older demographic watching broadcast, linear TV. They also tended to watch Rugby and the Women’s World Cup (presumably for similar reasons - older demographic on linear telly).
Curiously the biggest swing from Tory to Labour voters was on Clarkson’s Farm.
The section is here if you are interested:
Define freedom? The freedom for tobacco companies to get you chemically addicted to nicotine and then extract hundreds of thousands of pounds from you over the course of your life?
Where would you personally draw the line on smoking with regards balancing freedom and public health?
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