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I sometimes feel like people get so caught up on the word "prohibition" that their arguments bend towards addiction enabling at a societal scale. Smoking is beyond crazy when you look at the stats (using USA for convenience, but similar for other countries)
The problem is simple: cigarettes are a massive drain on the health system, directly and indirectly. The solution should be just as simple: buying cigarettes forfeits your rights to health care treatments for the damage caused. You get some palliative care but we save the lung transplants for people who aren't killing themselves.
If you think that's too harsh then you should stomach the cost of prohibition, policing and black markets. No matter how shitty, costly and dangerous it may be I promise that it will save lives and money if it's a barrier to even a fraction of smokers.
You can make every single argument you used for unhealthy eating. Especially since its the leading cause of death in the United States yet no one is talking about banning oreos. Regulate the industry and inform the population to make better choices but a ban just a uncalculated reaction. We've literally seen it with prohibition and the drug war and it ultimately doesn't work. You can't just say that the black market won't be as costly because you have no idea what will actually happen. Global smoking trends have been going down. Let's just continue to do what has been proven to work.
Also denying ppl healthcare based on their bad health habits is facist...
Exactly. Following that logic, joggers should be barred from getting synthetic knees in later life.
This is all ideal rhetoric for some more neoliberal budget cuts to healthcare systems.
You forget we are not talking about the USA here. The article is about the UK where we already have a lot more food regulation than you do in the USA.
If you really want to go down the road of things proven to work, maybe start within the USA and introduce the effective firearms legislation and regulations that most of the civilised world has proven reduces per capita gun deaths and almost entirely negates mass murder of schoolchildren.
They're not even close to comparable as far as health crisis go. People need to eat; nobody needs to smoke. It's possible to eat oreos without taking years off your life. Hell, it's possible to have a diet entirely of oreos with some nutrition supplements. You won't die from second hand oreos.
I'd believe this argument 80 years ago when big tobacco was still hiding evidence but not today. The calculations are right there, millions of lives being thrown away and trillions of dollars burned (in spite of massive progress!) while we drag our feet and push back on something as simple as a generation purchase ban.
Prohibition was a naive attempt with no thought put toward implementation. It was backed largely by appeals to morality and sin instead of strong public health research. And even in spite of that, it did succeed in cutting alcohol consumption.
A whole generation had dramatically lower rates of alcohol use and it took until the 1970s for per-capita consumption to match the pre-prohibition peak. There's a lot we can learn about public health policy from Prohibition but people only focus on bootleggers and gangsters.
Woof that's certainly one to unwrap. The war on drugs was a failure as a public health policy but wildly successful as a tool for creating a slave class and an imperial casus belli. Even a glance at policies that restricted drug research and criminalized drug use shows that public health was a fig leaf. And if you're using drug proliferation as justification for ulterior power consolidation then eliminating drug use is obviously counter productive. I don't think it bears much weight in these conversations.
Which is my point. I'm also not saying that other methods like education, sin taxes or tobacco alternatives are a waste of time. Public health problems always have to be fought on multiple fronts. But at some point you have to decide how much time and effort you're going to spend tiptoeing around vice industries. A generation purchase ban is simple and gradual; and there's no evidence that it won't work unless you make oblique comparisons to other failed/mixed public health efforts.
Yet accidents or acts of violence while under the influence, involving other people and getting them killed needlessly.
I'm saying so because I was a victim of violence related to alcohol abuse.
Including those, we're talking in the range of 170k deaths. And only about 15% of people in the USA smoke compared to 54% drinking. Obviously still a health crisis but shows just how crazy bad smoking is.