Alcohol is heavily restricted, though. You can't sell it to minors, younger minors can't drink it in public, you can't sell/buy/make it above a certain proof, you can only resell it from authorized distributors, it is taxes, and so on.

Sure, banning cigarettes for a specific generation is a much more stringent restriction, but plenty of other restrictions exist.

You must live in a democracy. If you ever lived in a country where the government curtailed freedoms by fiat, you'd understand that it can and it will. I happened to be living in Vietnam when the government just randomly decided one day that smoking would be banned everywhere, effective immediately. You might think that's simply putting a thumb on the scale; but you also haven't tried to visit the New York Times website from there and later found yourself in a room with officials asking for all your passwords. And clearly you're not familiar with the preferred way of clearing traffic jams, which is driving a jeep through a crowd of motorbikes while a guy with a long bamboo cane whacks anyone who's in the way.

Thumb on the scale my ass. Totalitarianism is control over the little things.

Take away smoking from the next generation and they move to caffeine or vapes. Take away alcohol and there are revolutions and religious extremist revivals.

But putting that aside, if a citizen supports banning cigarettes for people born after a certain date, but not alcohol, that certainly seems hypocritical to me.

Beyond whether something is "bad for you", the key aspect in a free society is whether the State should decide for you (we're entrusted with the right to vote, after all).

Demolition Man has turned out to be the most accurate prediction of the future regarding those issues among all the 90s movies. Quite interesting.

What mechanisms do you foresee for it to fail? If stores stop selling cigarettes, the UK will have no other choice but to stop smoking them. I wonder what will come to replace them though. People have a peculiar tendency of forming addictive habits.

Regarding question 2, personally, I am uncomfortable with the idea of a nanny state.

The title is hyperbolic. It isn't a ban on smoking. It's a "ban on buying cigarettes." Commerce is being restricted, not consumption. If, presumably, you bring your own in from France, or someone bums one to you, it would appear you're free to smoke it.

That broadly seems to strike a fair balance. Banning purchases and sales, not possession or consumption.

I guess that liberty was plenty abused on every non-smoker in a non-smoking area, that ended up coughing in clouds of smoke anyway. Smoking affects everyone around you whether you want it or not, and while you may smoke for 50 years and end up being perfectly healthy, some may get cancer from it, even for a very small dose.

So is banning the sale of leaded gasoline.

Unless their ancestors were already citizens beforehand.

Which I guess could be considered a more generous concession.

"Why is the government stopping me from murdering people and stealing from them? it's my right to decide how I live!"

When I was a smoker, I used to decry places that were less liberal about where I was allowed to smoke, and places with high taxes. As a former smoker, I know that the high taxes have enabled a lot of people to stop, and the restrictions got to a point where smoking was less "cool" and more "pariah" behavior. These influences helped me stop.

If you didn't read "The Easy Way to Stop Smoking", go do so, and smoke/vape no more.

If everyone appreciated how little value they receive from tobacco/nicotine and how easy it really is to quit, there would be no market.

The law (as proposed) restricts sales and giving to someone else, not the smoking itself.

https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/60034/documents/628...

If you’re a pothead who can’t make it through your day without a smoke, then god knows you’ll find a connect - and if you’re addicted to cigarettes, I’m pretty sure you won’t have much trouble getting your fix.

I could be totally wrong tho, but at least that's what it feels like. It feels like "all of them" smoke. Either vape or real cigarettes and quite a few of them using cigarettes

Not to say lobbyists don’t have an effect in the UK, they do. But the US has a particularly egregious setup.

I assume all the ones who were young enough to have worked tobacco at its peak are now working for Meta, OpenAI or Flutter.

As we know, smoking can cause lots of problems, including for babies if the mother smokes during pregnancy.

Most of the indoor smoking bans in the U.S. have been based entirely on the fact that second hand smoke affects the employees who are forced to be there.

Further, drinking has a far deeper cultural resonance, so smoking is clearly the lower hanging fruit.

And it’s not like the UK has not been taking action against drinking. For example, they’ve imposed minimum alcohol taxes which have been directly linked to lower consumption.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/alcohol-duty-rates

That cuts down on drinking, except for the alcoholics of course. Scotland also imposed a minimum price per unit on alcohol, in an attempt to further cut consumption:

https://www.gov.scot/policies/alcohol-and-drugs/minimum-unit...

Whether that works is an open question, but in the UK things like "the sugar tax" have a visible affect on consumer consumption rates of "bad things".

Alcohol is very difficult to ban as you can take almost any kind of sugar feedstock and turn it into alcohol.

Given the massive cost smoking imposes on the health sector, I find it hard to believe that's remotely possible.

Alcohol is another story, we're not ready to remove that yet.

If you are a smoker, you are much more likely to be a burden on this system.

Makes sense to ban these types of activities if the costs of them are socialized rather than individualized.

One of the principal jobs of government is to stand for the good of the collective against individual selfishness.

How far do you want to take this? Your choice of diet may have a negative effect on others by way of having to pay for additional medical care.

I do. I prefer people not to get lung cancer, among other afflications. And for no benefit that I can think of.

I don't live in the UK, but I say: good to them, and boo to you, for your misanthropic attitude.

improved health outcomes?

Props to this Vice reporter (in 2022) for snagging an interview with a municipal staffer in a suburb of Manchester, I guess. I’m sure he’s a very busy man. But he doesn’t exactly seem notable (try Googling his name) and I’m not really sure what this is supposed to prove in the absence of any corroborating reporting.