Creating a new illegal drug market.
In fairness, smoking tobacco is one of the few routes of administration where outlawing makes sense. The overall societal cost is very high, even for non-smokers, as in second-hand smokers and cigarette butts littering. It's one of the few substances that health experts often recommend to make as unattractive as possible, be it through taxation or law.
I don't really mind vaping or heating that much, I'd be fine with making cigarettes illegal while keeping the alternatives. Unfortunately, latest legislation has imposed higher burdens on the latter while doing jack about smoking.
Using the litter aspects of cigarettes as a reason to curb smoking has always been a tough one for me. Say someone quits smoking and takes up vaping. Now we have introduced plastic waste & to an extent e-waste in the form of batteries in the disposable vapes.
I don't have an answer to it but I have at least thought about how there is no 100% environmentally friendly alternative outside of smoking straight tobacco leaf in rolling papers.
The "disposable" vapes are a different issue that needs to be tackled. I'm pretty sure that a meaningful deposit (5 or 10 euros) and the obligation for every seller to accept returns would solve the problem.
I mean smoking itself isn't environmentally friendly. You're taking all the nicotine and smashing it with oxygen, producing lots of carbon particulates including CO2 and CO - greenhouse gases. Yes, it's only a tiny amount, but you don't get that with vaping. With vaping you just extract whole molecules, rather than breaking things down, at least as long as the temperature is properly controlled.
A good vape should have next to no waste. The vape itself should not be disposable, and batteries should last a year minimum even with heavy use. That just leaves whatever container you get your liquid in, which wouldn't be hard to recycle. Alternatively you could use a dry herb vape, along with pipe tobacco - but if we're honest if you have a dry herb vape you're probably not putting tobacco in it. You're going to put in things like lavender and thyme, of course.
You're forgetting the harm from all the fires (house, grass, and forest) caused by smokers too.
Shittest high ever. Only people already hooked would be interested and they could buy it legally anyway.
For some. Some would ultimately quit and some would never start.
There can be some significant downside to a black market though. De-regulation could pose additional health risks to users as the product may be exposed to unknown and untested chemicals. Not to mention the additional violence and related crimes that always seem to accompany a black market. Prohibition didn't work for alcohol. Prohibition isn't working for Weed. Why do we think it will work for nicotine?
I think a big part of the difference is that most people get addicted to cigarettes just by being around it, rather than seeking it out. Cigarettes don't get you high/drunk (well OK, you get a small buzz early on, but nothing like weed or alcohol).
People will seek out weed even when it's illegal because the risk is worth the reward (to them), because it comes with an intense high you can't really get anywhere else. I don't see nearly as many people seeking out cigarettes in the same way, unless they're already hooked.
I don't think it will "solve" the cigarette problem, but I do think that prohibition for cigarettes won't go quite the same route as prohibition for weed and alcohol.
Now, whether I want the government to be able to ban recreational substances just because they think it's bad (or use that as an excuse) is another question
Do it. First decision I've heard him make that isn't about making profit for himself.... unless he has invested in vape shops ... ah that makes more sense. Fuck Rishi
we have already taken steps to reduce smoking rates. This includes providing 1 million smokers in England with free vape kits via our world-first ‘swap to stop’ scheme
Which family member do you think invested heavily in whichever company got the contract for these vapes?
YES WASTE MORE MONEH ON WAR ON DRUGS!!!!!! It's not like it's completely ineffective and is literally killing people🥰😜
If they want to ban tobacco let them first legalise weed, acid, and psylocybin. That'd be a fair trade.
All these progressively restrictive laws have been good to me. I'm of the generation who remembers smoking on planes, and my grandmother smoking in her hospital bed.
I was probably at two packs a day in the nineties because it was cheap and acceptable.
These days, a pack will last me a week, and I only ever smoke in my backyard at home, in clothing dedicated to the habit that get washed separately from my other clothes.
Bans and social stigma have forced me into near non-smoking without ever consciously trying.
Do I ever have an occasional night of celebratory drinking where I exceed that trend? You betcha, and I don't feel sorry about it. But I'm glad that I'm not the chain smoking beef jerky with a voice three octaves lower than it should be that my grandparents were.
I still believe that people should be able to enjoy vice and that you shouldn't be completely ostracized from society for not living a perfect organic free range fair trade intoxicant free perfectly vegan whatever else life.
But to phase out tobacco as it has been going, I have found that I haven't minded at all in the long term.
(As to the occasional celebratory night, for completely different reasons, I hardly drink anymore. Also was not a conscious choice or effort. It just lost its attraction for me)
About bloody time. Cigarettes are disgusting and do nothing but immense harm to those who smoke them, and those around them.
Sunak is a tosser, but cigarettes are a no brainer. Sure, old boomers still smoke them, but only the dumbest young people still smoke, and most of them use e-cigs (which are still bad, but nowhere remotely near as bad).
Several of my grandparents died before I could ever know them because of smoking, for example. Fuck smoking. Smoking kills.
Two of my grandparents died before my birth because they smoked. I smoked. I still vape. I hate that companies make money on addiction. This is still stupid.
Tried going cold Turkey today, made it like 14 hours.
It’s the right thing to do. It’s a very hard addiction to escape. I know a guy who beat heroin and can’t beat nicotine.
It took me years to quit, I slowly cut cigs out of my daily activities.
Good on you! That’s awesome. thankfully I’m not inhaling anything anymore, but damn if it’s hard to quit the substance entirely. Big ups to everyone who made it out though.
Yeah its tough, just do your best and stick with it. Now my only nicotine is from a cigar a few times a year.
I knew someone who kicked a cocaine habit and stopped drinking alcohol, but died of cancer because he couldn't quit smoking.
Smoking is one of the very few things everyone is better off not doing.
Ban alcohol too or it's hypocrisy once again.
Checks history
Wait a minute...
ban every single drug and watch how wrong its gonna go
they simply cannot stop repeating the mistakes of the past can they
I'm very pro-legalization but honestly tobacco is a shit drug. No real high, very addictive and awful health effects. I don't see many people going through the hassle of maintaining their addiction illegally if it was banned everywhere.
Didn't he just say yesterday that he didn't want the government to butt into people's lives? I thought that was why he abandoned all those laws which didn't exist. You know, the meat tax and the 7 bins xD
prohibition still doesn't work
The (stopped?) trend in the US had been to tax cigs to make them unaffordable. Just before the last major hike, my brand was about $5/pack. Now it is $10-12. So glad I quit.
Is that a viable strategy, to continue tax/price hikes?
Did it stop you smoking? If so, then yes it worked.
Every 10% increase in cigarette tax results a 4% reduction in consumption among adults, and a 7% decrease amongst youth. Source
It was a minor motivator for me. Bigger ones were things like not dying and my son.
Interesting stats, thanks.
Good
Thank god. Hope this gets passed. Next do vaping and get rid of it
Legalise weed but ban tobacco!
Just saying.
IMHO they should ban all types of smoking. If people want to eat weed brownies and nicotine chewing gums, I don't care. But smoking just smells bad and is really unpleasant to be around in the street.
Just ban smoking drugs and combustion engine. I just want clean air.
Yeah! Prohibition always works out flawlessly.
Living in a tolerant society means that we need to be willing to deal with these little inconveniences in our lives. One of my neighbours has kids who love to play on a go-kart and wake me up at 6am on a Saturday morning, sometimes I can smell people barbecuing even though I’m vegan, and so on.
As long as it’s not a direct risk to health (e.g. smoking indoors) and not extremely obnoxious (playing extremely loud music and refusing to turn it down) people should be able to do what they want to.
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