New Zealand scraps world-first smoking ‘generation ban’ to fund tax cuts
New Zealand scraps world-first smoking ‘generation ban’ to fund tax cuts
Health experts say axing plan to block sales of tobacco products to next generation will cost thousands of lives
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So I'm a little torn on this
In general I'm very left leaning, and I was a fan of most policies adern put in. This one I thought was a weird one and really harsh. You want to raise the smoking age to 25 or 30 sure. But banning it entirely is to me like banning weed entirely or when people tried to ban alcohol, etc.
I understand smoking isn't healthy for anyone. But it's still someone's choice to do so or not. Drinking isn't healthy either. Lots of people die every year from drinking entirely too much. You can't ban that entirely either.
Bans work better on tobacco because unlike alcohol or drugs, they’re used habitually but generally not recreationally. That is, the role of cigarettes in society and individually is different from those of alcohol, cannabis, and the like.
I am going to hazard a guess that tobacco industry lobbying is responsible for this. They went into Eastern European nations and pitched the idea that tobacco control was bad for the country’s economy because without smokers they’d have to deal with more people who live to retirement age, and killing them earlier makes things cheaper.
Banning cigarettes removes them from convenience stores, making them much harder to buy. The work they’ve done so far has pulled the smoking population down to 8% from over 16% ten years ago, although it’s still 20% among Māori.
I would not be surprised if the ban cut that in half or more.
I guess the difference is you have a right to smoke, the 6 people sitting next to you have 6 rights not to. Maybe that was the consideration at the time?
Then just ban it in public spaces and let businesses have private smoking areas if they want to. That's what was done here in India and it seems to have worked out okay in my state at least.
2nd hand smoke isn’t someone’s choice and the difference between banning cigarettes and banning a full class of a drug is that people aren’t going to turn to the black market for cigarettes (barring poverty) when vaping is still legal
Banning in public spaces or in specific areas something would be fine