aside from the issue of ‘prohibition still doesn’t work’, i don’t think giving kids or “underage” adults criminal charges for cigarettes is making anything better for anyone
Smoking age is specifically the ability to purchase. There are no criminal/civil charges for underage smoking. The crimes are specifically 1) selling to minors 2) buying for minors.
TL;DR: No one goes/will go to jail for underage smoking. They won’t even get in trouble for buying. The onus is on the vendor OR the legal purchaser who handed them off.
Incorrect.
A black market is created, kids still smoke, but poor people making a buck selling to kids go to jail.
It doesn’t fix the issue and syphons poor people into prisons.
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Prohibition laws do put people in prison.
“Noone goes to prison for underage smoking”. False. The people selling the cigarettes, poor people trying to make a buck, go to jail for the underage smoking.
I suggest we do nothing.
Prohibition doesn’t work.
Mind your own business.
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You’re just being purposefully obtuse now.
No. The kids aren’t the ones going to prison, but the prohibition laws do send people to prison.
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No one but you is being obtuse here.
You “corrected” someone by making an entirely different point from the one they made. In fact, the person you said was “wrong” actually stated the very thing you did.
No one is saying your point is wrong. Just that it isn’t a correction.
I would argue that society should reserve the right to punish individuals who harm others for their personal benefit.
And I would argue that selling a physically addictive substance that directly causes harm with no benefit to the user for personal profit is causing harm.
So while I don’t support arresting people for smoking, I 100% so support arresting people for selling.
Again, I just see mental gymnastics.
So you just outright said that people should be free to smoke, but anyone who sells what is being smoked should be incarcerated.
How is that not a complete oxymoron?
No. You have a factually flawed bias against a thing, and you want to mob up with other people to enforce your opinions and will upon people you disagree with.
As a result, you want to imprison poor people and not accomplish what you claim to want to accomplish.
There is no oxymoron.
Smoking is harming oneself.
Selling is harming another.
They are not equivalent.
poor people making a buck selling to kids go to jail
As they should
Happy you are for the siphoning of poor people to for profit prisons.
Really sounds like your plan to eradicate tobacco from existing is solid.
Works for pedophilia too.
How do you propose this black market gets created? In theory, no new addicts would get created because the smoking age rises in lockstep with the people themselves.
They should raise the heroin age
Yes, because no one has ever smoked before they reached the legal age.
Are you fucking with me right now?
There is already a black/gray marked near many schools (for the younger, there are cigarettes and for the older there is weed.) it’s a market where there is just one person selling, it is more a fluid market where the young people sell and buy to each other, mostly there are multiple kids with connections to get the goods in any school and then it rotates through the different kids by selling, buying, stealing etc. Source: I’m 26 now, and don’t believe that has changed since I left school.
You really have a surface-level understanding of how the world works, I take it.
General mindset of a standard prohibitionist.
I know this is pretty radical, but if we made smoking FFA way fewer people should theoretically start smoking in the first place. From my experience when I was still at school most of the people there were only smoking because it’s “cool”, making smoking legal for everyone should take the coolness factor away at least.
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Please, oh dear god…
Please tell me what FFA means and how it doesn’t amount to “send poor people to prison”.
FFA just means “free for all” (it’s a term from competitive games, in case you shouldn’t know), in this context I used it as another word for ‘legal’.
Oh thank god.
Yes, I 100 percent agree with you. Your thought process is the way.
Sorry I was so adversarial in my first comment. A lot of the rest of this thread has me all sorts of triggered.
how to create a blackmarket with health issues
I’d prefer they start at 60 and raise it every year, but I’ll take what I can get.
Sunak should start publicly smoking all the time, then it will be the lamest thing and teen smoking will crater.
This is an amazing, for the sole reason that everyone who is 17 and change now will turn 18, be able to smoke, the law will bump to 19, they won’t be allowed to smoke any more, but then they’ll turn 19 and they’ll be able to smoke again until the law raises to 20…
I believe they passed a similar law like this in New Zealand. You could be 50 and still too young to smoke lol.
Smokefree action plan: Cigarette sales to be banned for younger generations
Why adjust the law annually? Why not just write it as “no person born after Jan 1, 2005”?
This is the better way to write the law of course, but the ham-fisted way it’s proposed by Rishi would look more like what I wrote, because he said specifically that the age should rise one year every year.
So the age is going to get risen to 19, then the Tories are going to lose the next election (basically the only reason to have the election at this point is to find out by how much they’re going to lose so we know how much to laugh at them), and then the law stops getting updated because it’s a dumb and badly written, and then Labour don’t implement it any more.
If anything they will probably just rewrite the law to the above version.
You can just make it a “born before this date” and it just solves this entirely. That date just doesn’t change. Everyone who sells darts memorizes it. Then it actually changes every day by a day. Fuck it, let’s give it an hour too, just to fuck with those kids born an hour later
…how do 14 year olds get smokes now?
Making it illegal to buy at certain ages has never worked…banning them outright also won’t work. You cannot stop people from doing things, no matter how many words you put on paper.
Has the war on drugs not been a thought to these people? It is useless and does nothing.
I agree that prohibition doesn’t really prevent a thing from being consumed. However, I don’t think an age limit really counts as prohibition. Selling substances to those who are underage is bad and there should be potential consequences for doing so.
Underage in this scenario could be 40, 50, 60. They will just drive to an Indian reserve and buy cigarettes.
I assume you’re talking about teens though…I’m fine with the current age limits, but increasing the age by 1 year ever year won’t do anything.
Um, you do realize that Rishi Sunak is the Prime Minister of the UK? It’s a long and arduous drive to the nearest Indian reservation.
This is on world news, so I took it as world change. But no, I didn’t know that
On balance I think it’s a good thing. A gradual ban like this will help break the smoking culture and save some lives. Maybe it will help gen-z get laid too.
If it doesn’t work then why are the vast majority of minors non smokers?
Probably because the vast majority of adults are also non smokers.
Why have laws against drunk driving or speeding? You cannot stop people from doing things, no matter how many words you put on paper.
It’s true, you can’t stop people from doing what they want to do with laws, but smoking doesn’t smear a child down the street for everyone to see. What a terrible comparison
Fine, why have laws against littering, or smoking in public buildings, or jaywalking, or embezzlement? People are just going to do those things anyway, no matter what is written on paper.
We have laws to provide an enforcement mechanism for behavior that is unacceptable in our society. You’re right, in that laws written on paper can be ignored, but you do so at a risk of the penalties laid out in the law. Your argument essentially invalidates the purpose and effectiveness of every law. Clearly, we have laws and they work, so your argument is frivolous and empty.
Why not just ban Marijuana again…
Because the social perception of marijuana use has changed? You’re not really keeping up with the conversation here…
I am, but it will always go back to the same. You want big daddy to protect you from others doing harm to themselves, whereas I see people being able to police themselves and if they screw up it’s their problem.
If only smoking harmed just the user, but secondhand smoke kills children daily in the US. https://www.lung.org/quit-smoking/smoking-facts/health-effects/secondhand-smoke
It’s also been found that 3rd-hand smoke can be just as dangerous a secondhand smoke. Not to mention that smoking smells awful and makes indoor and outdoor public places unpleasant. Smokers also routinely fail to dispose of cigarettes properly, leading to unsightly and unhealthy toxic litter, and causes multiple uncontrolled forest/wildfires every year.
You need to throw out your preconceived notions about smoking and the purpose of laws, they are not compatible with reality.
The war on drugs can’t work because the CIA uses illicit drug running to fund off-the-books projects.
Maybe if they stopped fucking doing that?
Sure on a global scale, but on a more macro level, the war on drugs failed because people want to buy and consume drugs… if there is no legal, regulated, safe method to buy them then the black market will fill that gap… same under rationing, same under prohibition, same with drugs and in the future cigarettes…!
The war on drugs succeeded, because it was actually a war on black people. It was never meant to stop drug abuse.
Don’t leave out hippies and hispanics. Cannabis is called ‘marijuana’ in the US because it stoked anti-hispanic racism. It was also a convenient way to attack liberals in general.
I would like to congratulate drugs, for winning the War on Drugs.
There is a legal, regulated, mostly safe method to buy cigarettes. It is inaccessible if you are under a certain age, but only the seller/provider is punished for violating regulations. It’s okay to have restrictions on what children can consume.
While current laws on illegal drugs do not work, arguing against any regulation whatsoever is similarly silly, the laws obviously work. Smoking rates have dramatically declined since those laws and public education campaigns began.
True, but the want of cigarettes is much lower than recreational drugs. One of the reasons they’re still so popular is because they’re legal and easy to get.
I don’t smoke and never have, but I can’t imagine anyone starting smoking in order to get some effect like with marijuana.
Yet, the addiction of cigarettes is much more powerful than non narcotic drugs & every day new people are starting smoking.
I think you’re wrong. The market isn’t magic, it needs supply to meet demand and there is a steady supply of drugs to fulfill the demands because of state intervention in the market. The CIA isn’t the only government entity that uses the drug trade to raise illicit funds for off-the-books jobs, it’s just the biggest. If it weren’t for bad state actors, the war on drugs probably would have worked to a large extent; maybe not eliminate the drug trade completely, but at least reduce the volume of trade substantially.
It’s not the 1980’s. Reagan’s long dead. What makes you think they still do that?
The war on drugs can’t work because people want drugs. Has literally fuck-all to do with anything or anyone else.
Drug smuggling could never be totally eliminated but I’m sure the government could do a better job if the goal was actually to stop the drug trade.
But that is not and never was the goal.
No no no, minimum age should increase by 360 days every year, that way people can still have hope that some day they’ll be able to smoke. Staying true to how capitalism works.
New Zealand has done this
lame. create a legal path to execute the tobacco company execs instead.
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I hope this doesn’t happen because I love my ciggies, but this plan could actually accomplish what you people claim to want to accomplish.
Wait… no it won’t.
But still, at least it’s a genuine plan and not the systemic War on Drugs, prohibitionist, “put the underclass in the for profit prisons” bullshit all the prohibitionist circle-jerkers keep screaming into their echo chambers.
Man the fuck up and outlaw it for everyone instead of this sneaky prohibition that only affect people that can’t vote yet. It’s such a cowardly, disingenuous way of doing it.
Prohibition never works, the best bet is to keep it legal and make it as inconvenient as possible like: raising taxes on tobacco, make it illegal to smoke outside of dedicated zones (Quebec has done it I believe), fine people who litter their cigarette butts (hard to implement but, it might deter a large majority from doing it), keep helping smokers to quit and keep raising awareness for younger people.
This is the way. There are so few places to smoke in BC that I pretty much only ever see people doing it 5 metres from a bus stop.
They are so expensive that the few people that still do it smoke maybe a pack a week.
We even banned the sale of no-nic vape juice because they were becoming a gateway to nicotine addiction for teenagers.
I just visited Canada for 4 days, was around a lot of people and I only smelled smoke twice. Both times were outside the airport (once arriving and once departing).
We even banned the sale of no-nic vape juice because they were becoming a gateway to nicotine addiction for teenagers.
That’s crazy and backwards. Ecigs were a critical tool I used to kick a 2 pack a day habit. Vaping is the best smoking cessation system around.
except the ones using it don’t even smoke rn.
Nah the best bet is to remove the profit motive. And through legal means execute every cigarette company owner or employee who covered up health risks for mass manslaughter.
This method stops current smokers from being criminalised.
If you ban it like prohibition, you will instantaneously create a black market. Continually increasing the age you can buy cigarettes is easier. Everyone that this effects will not have the option to legally create a cigarette habit/addiction.
A straight up outlawing would have the maximum effect. But it would be costly to enforce, whilst increasing overall criminal activity.
They just need to outlaw the commercial production of cigarettes. I’m very anti cigarette personally, but at the end of the day, tobacco is a plant and should not be outlawed. But outlawing commercial products it makes tobacco legal and accessible to those who want it. With commercial cigarettes being less available, in guessing through either lack of convenience or lack of ability to act on an impulse, that the amount of smokers will drop.
That’ll never happen, the tobacco industry is too big and too many jobs will be lost all at once, so it becomes highly politicized and loses popular support. With the proposed law, the tobacco industry at least has time to pivot to something else.
So let’s give the companies that have lied about the harms and effects of their product a heads up? They never gave people who died of cancer when they knew it caused cancer but denied it. Moving the age will just give the time for the business owners to get more of the money out and fuck over the smaller employees anyways.
I honestly think there is no solution that doesn’t have negative effects. I’m personally very against the banning of something (especially a plant) as a solution to a problem as it creates plenty more problems (see America’s drug problems)
Ok, but and believe me I’m all for this, cocaine and heroin are plants as well, or at least you can grow coca and poppies and get the drugs from them. Should cocaine and heroin be legal as well just because a) they’re plant derived, and b) people will use the drugs and get addicted to them because that’s how it works? As I said, I personally would legalize, tax, and educate people about safe recreational, therapeutic, and medical drug use for all drugs personally, but most people find that too extreme.
Unironically yes, cocaine and heroin should be legal, or at the very least decriminalized. If they were legal, regulated, and you could pop into a headshop and buy them, the black markets surrounding them would begin to evaporate.
I agree, as I said
Hmmm, where have I heard this proposal before?
The reason I used the word Prohibition is because I think it’s bullshit either way. We’re sitting here legalizing pot because Prohibition doesn’t work, but somehow doing this chickenshit year-by-year outlawing is somehow going to fix something that education is doing a fine enough job. People are going to smoke cigarettes, there’s always a group that will do it, legal or not. Whether you want a crime problem around it or not is the obvious question these chucklefucks don’t seem to understand, despite repeated examples to the contrary.
Add in the danger of having the following mentality: “what are these rights laying around that I’m not utilizing? What, that person over there enjoys having these rights? Well, I don’t like that person, so I don’t care about their rights fuck em”
This ladies and gentlemen, is how you Nazi 101 (but with rainbow flags and affirmative action this go-around)
If this is the only effort, it’s weak. Better to also (or instead) tax each box by another 20 pounds. Kids don’t have that money. They’ll find other things to do.
Taxation is a tool but it also creates inequality where rich people are able to smoke and poor people can’t. That situation risks making tobacco a signifier of wealth - an aspirational good like an expensive handbag.
good, let them smoke and DIE
If rich kids are able to get lung cancer and poor kids are priced out of it, I don’t feel bad for the poor kids.
It’s already prohibitively taxed to be around £12-15 for a 20 pack. There are 4 corner stores within a 5 minute walk of my house that do them under the counter for a fiver, and you can bet they don’t care about IDs either
Contact the HMRC fraud department. They would stop these sales very quickly.
I much prefer to see kids vaping.
It’s much harder to be intimidated by a gang of 10 youths in balaclavas when they smell like a pack of Fruit Salads.
Vaping is a joke, they stuck the addictive chemical (nicotine) in it and now they are hooked on vaping. Let them sell vaping goods but they shouldn’t be allowed to add nicotine to them.
Given that for most it’s a less harmful alternative to smoking that makes zero sense. Aside from it’s addictive properties nicotine is on about the same level as caffeine in terms of damage.
Caffeine? No, the science says otherwise
Do you know the piece of cocaine?
NZ already did this and it is the most cowardly way to avoid political blowback.
There’s plenty of other options for minimising smoking. A more altruistic way is by lifting people out of poverty and tackling social disintegration, since smokers are overwhelmingly poor and disaffected.
Your right there are better ways. Both methods should be implemented. A carrot and stick approach is going to be more effective.
I don’t think we can expect the altruistic way from a Billionaire Tory. As far as policy goes, this is the best one the Tory have had in a long time. But that doesn’t say much.
So instead of reducing a clearly destructive habit now we should wait for a major social change that likely won’t happen. I don’t see how that is more altruistic for the “poor and disaffected”.
You can either try to do things the right way and cure multiple social ills, or you can do it the wrong way and end up with different rules for different adults all in an attempt to prohibition your way out of one issue.
As UK economy continues to crumble, Rishi is focusing on the real issues.
Cool, when does the minimum age for joining the military start to raise by one year every year?
What’s with the whataboutism?
It’s directly related. Why are 18 year olds able to lock themselves into a 6 year contract that they might be killed before they see the end of, when they are, legally, too dumb to make their own decisions regarding a chemical they put in their bodies?
It’s really simple. The ruling class of society benefits more sending the little shit into the military than it costs. The ruling class doesn’t benefit as much when this little shit costs more than the little shit produces. It has nothing to do with protecting the little shit, it has to do with protecting the people in power.
They can choose to take hormone blockers at 12, but they can’t choose to have sex until they’re 18 (depending on local statutes). The laws are filled with hypocrisy.
They’re right, there shouldn’t be recruiters in school that’s predatory as shit.
Do they do that in the UK? I didn’t think they were quite so gung-ho about their military.
I didn’t know people still used that racist phrase.
I didn’t know gung ho was a racist term and now I look it up I see that it is clearly not.
I’m not sure who your authority is that determines the offense of words, but I have friends from China that take great offense to the term.
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The military shouldn’t be allowed to actively recruit anyone regardless of their age. It’s inherently predatory to everyone in this society.
“We operate a Check-74 policy. If you are lucky enough to look younger than 70, we will ask for ID when buying cigarettes”
Maybe we will make groundbreaking leaps in cosmetic surgery. Or have Jackass-style elderly disguises become popular.
Rishi is just jealous that they aren’t one of the cool kids
https://www.theonion.com/secondhand-smoke-linked-to-secondhand-coolness-1819564071
Rishi it’s a background character in his own life. There are more dynamic jellyfish.
