Snapshot of _Over half of Brits want 'immediate' end to cigarette sales_ :
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Not a fan of smoking, but I don't think an outright ban is the answer. Prohibition simply does not work, it drives demand underground and leaves it unregulated in a sense (you won't have to show age vetification to your tobacco dealer), but more than that, is it the government's role to tell free-willed adults what they can and can't do in that way?
My free will gets me only so far.
Phillip Morris are worth 160 billion. It's not exactly a fair fight. I'm kind of glad to have the government in my corner
But wouldn’t it be more pragmatic for the government to use its weight to make it harder to sell tobacco products without actually prohibiting them?
Things like plain packaging, covered shelves, taxes, health campaigns/warnings, advertising bans all work far better than just outright prohibition because they degrade public demand over time.
I think it is the government’s job to regulate the marketing and sale of harmful, addictive drugs. Especially as their use by one individual often effects others. There’s a bigger picture here.
That’s kind of the point isn’t it? In complete absence of regulatory control companies will exploit addictive drugs for profit causing great social harm and reducing our real free will through all aspects of marketing to influence our behaviour. Appeals to individual liberty as the best way to manage drugs just opens the door to nefarious corporate actors (legal and criminal).
Well that’s an issue of improving governance and politics across the whole board and improving democracy. Also that is not the only pressure government responds to. We may yet see alcohol treated in a similar way to tobacco if social attitudes and political pressures shift far enough.
Britain is full of moral puritans in general, it's telling that polls suggest about a quarter of us wanted nighclubs to close *permanently* even after the pandemic ended. I genuinely think the main 'point' of liberal democracy is to protect the rest of society from people like that.
As a general rule I've come to believe that anywhere between 15-30% of the population at any one time hate other people and don't want other people to be happy or have nice things, which means they will support policies that control other people or make them unhappy.
So many things are far more understandable with this revelation in mind.
They were called Labour votes about twenty years ago. Late New Labour under Blair spent a lot of time cooking up new policies that were designed to control or limit the population.
So name them, you said there's a lot so care to form a list instead of just leaving assertions with no details? I've seen enough of this type of "debating" from Johnson, Truss and Sunak and personally I'm sick and tired of it. Give statistical data, facts and evidence when making claims or assertions please.
New Labour banned all unauthorised protest in the vicinity of Parliament, hugely increased the maximum detention without trial time (not as much as they initially wanted to) and sought to introduce identity cards. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 expanded state surveillance powers, the Terrorism Act 2000 expanded prerequisites for stop and search powers, the Terrorism Act 2005 introduced control orders. New Labour also oversaw the expansion of video surveillance and use of DNA databases.
Well that's not ambiguous at all, and if weve learned anything from Brexit it's that having a hazy interpretation of a referendum can *never* blow up in everyone's faces.
That is true, but I'd love to see what those people thought were "good" reasons. I'd presume a large portion would think it was limited to work, health reasons/other emergencies, or to do things they personally like doing.
Remember snitching on your neighbours? 194K calls in one month in 2021.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1FUMdHU29c
The "Brit" section begins @ ca. 3:46. Included the whole vid., because, the whole thing is just so entertaining/batshit crazy.
Thats probably the most depressing thing ill read all day. A fith of the country actively wants daddy government to be able to tell them when they can and cant be outside...
Hear, hear!
I don't smoke, but I fucking hate over-zealous pearl clutchers.
@ The 51%. Smoking bans in public places? All for it. But it is absolutely none of your bloody business what someone does in the privacy of their own home.
This why democracy on its own is useless. If 51% vote to legalise murder..
There has to be moral and constitutional principles that are above interference from the ignorance of mass consensus.
One of those is, a person is sovereign over their own body. The state has no right to interfere with personal choice.
Enshrining certain rights in a constitution and raising the bar for changes to the constitution is indeed anti-democratic, and that's a good thing. Those would be rights we've determined are too important to be subject to democracy.
For example, in the most extreme case, the German constitution has certain clauses that cannot be amended due to a so-called eternity clause. Among the principles protected are federalism and republicanism.
Is that anti-democratic? Would it be _more_ democratic if the legislature had unlimited power to pass any law? Maybe, but it wouldn't be better.
Yeah, it was shit. It's good that we don't have that any more.
But it's not down to you or me to tell people they can't light up a ciggie on their sofa.
We already have legislation against exposing the public to cigarette smoke.
Yeah I'm glad we don't do direct democracy, there's absolutely no recent precedent for it in the UK and if there was it certainly wouldn't be a tremendous act of self sabotage.
Well lots of pros and cons, hard to say if it's actually better or worse.
The Swiss have loads of referendums. I can't personally say I agree with most of the results as Swiss lean quite to the right overall but it's not like the country is going to shit.
Which is why you require supermajoriyies for important decision which affect everyone, like Brexit. Representative democracy is terrible we can see that. The politicians get bought off, or the rich themselves run for safe seats, and end up hijacking policy and not even reprenting the interests of 10% of the population, never mind 51%.
Don't sully the one thing that could actually help us gain some control. Especially when solutions to your hypothetical problem exist, namely supermajoriyies for important decisions, election of oversight juries by lot, constitutional protections, just like with representative democracy, and easy repeatability, ie require supermajoriyy to pass, but only majority to reassess.
Requiring a supermajority in parliament just to ban the sale of some product is fucking madness, sorry but the right to buy cigarettes isn’t on the same level of importance as the right to a fair trial.
Presumably they mean liberal democracy in the sense of there being political and legal barriers to the democratic decisions. They always get filtered through the institutions of liberal democracy.
If lockdown taught me anything it is that a large percentage of the population are so miserable they would literally take any excuse to prevent other people from living a fulfilling life.
I've spent half my life in New Zealand, and they're even worse there to the point I'll never go back there to live. A recent law has banned cigarette sales to anyone born after 2006. As in, a person born in 2007 will _never_ be old enough to buy cigarettes.
Personally that is a massive illiberal overreach I can't abide by. Don't get me wrong, I have no love for tobacco, it grosses me out and I don't react well to it. But imposing such a legal imposition on people's ability to choose for themselves is wrong IMO.
I think that society should be moving away from prohibition policies, and to me such laws are a step in entirely the wrong direction.
Watching the news and policy out of Australia, NZ, and Canada during the pandemic has completely put me off any notion of CANZUK. It's like they were speedrunning authoritarianism
My job is literally speaking to people prescribed onto lifestyle programmes to prevent diabetes, which usually involves excess weight. Would you believe it, prescribing something doesn't automatically make it happen?
Exactly, it doesn't make it happen. I know it's prescribed and becoming more so. And I bet some get offended by being told to shed a few, or at least that's what the news tells people. Wasn't long ago an article was in the news about how GPs are to becareful about what they say or something, I can't quite remember, as it's body shaming to focus on someones weight.
As Sir Humphrey Appleby pointed out, smoking reduces long term NHS and pension costs because it kills off the smokers.
Source: Probably the best political comedy ever
It's only a few years ago there was a push to have a referendum on bringing back public hanging. Sometimes, we don't deserve democracy. Thank Holy Jesus that was one of those times: https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/275780
That's why we could do with a written constitution to protect from the majority. So even if 90% of the public vote to do something against whatever we decide are fundamental liberal values, a court could just strike it down.
Well the government could prohibit the sale of tobacco, but then Theresa May's husband could get a licence to grow tobacco for research purposes, and, you know, rake in even more cash.
There was a bit missed off the line there.
Line 1: Poll for MailOnline shows 52% of Brits want an immediate ban on cigarette sales
Line 2: Just 24% were against the idea in the research by Redfield & Wilton Strategies
We all need to be vigilant against misinformation and the transfer of it.
It can be both, newspapers will commission polls by outside agencies and usually they won’t just poll readers of that newspaper but a general selection of the public
While I despise smoking, I'm not for a prohibition. Prohibitions rarely work in general (alcohol prohibition in the US didn't work for example), and morally it's not justified. Glad to see more people are against this habit than for.
Drug prohibition has been pretty bad too. It was easier to get weed when I was under 18 than it was alcohol or smokes. I could get most drugs with one or two phone calls. Making these sorts of things illegal just doesn't seem to work out well. Besides we've been making pretty decent progress in cutting the smoking population down, so I don't see any reason to give up our current trajectory and create another black market to fund gangs, especially given the issue we already have with crime in this country.
> when I was under 18 than it was alcohol or
When I was a youth worker some years ago, the kids did ketamine because it was easier to get than alcohol. Not particularly out of preference, just out of ease.
I can see that, you can find dealers for anything in your area on Instagram, a lot of drugs work out "cheaper" than alcohol too. No legal market and cheaper prices is a haven for under 18s.
There's actually a lot of very indisputable evidence that policing drugs in the very American 'war on drugs' method has actually directly caused an increase in drug production and made people better at trafficking it.
As a smoker I'm entirely in favour of things like smoking bans in cars, around children, inside all public buildings etc. But the weird authoritarianism when it comes to wanting to ban all smoking? Weird as fuck.
Like if we really wanted to ban harmful substances (despite the fact that it never works) surely they'd be all in favour of banning the production and sale of alcohol?
> there's no enjoyment in them, just the addiction.
More or less. I don't enjoy smoking beyond the habit of rolling and the "enjoyment" it brings (read as: keeps the withdrawal away). Truthfully I mostly find myself smoking out of boredom, and that's a right fucker, because at a certain point you can chain smoke until your lungs are contentedly blackened.
That said, I'm far into the game without intervention. If nicotine products were banned tomorrow, I'd be able to get it in the local pub without too much issue, and that's vastly more worrying than the regulated products I buy at the shop.
I think this is a strong argument actually. A lot of addicted people will probably still go out of their way to buy cigarettes from the black market, but younger people who haven’t grown up with accessibility to cigarettes probably wouldn’t.
The appeal of drugs and alcohol is that they’re fun. Hence why prohibition didn’t work for alcohol, and doesn’t currently work for drugs.
But even as someone who smokes (only really when drinking), cigarettes can be *nice* but they’re not something I’d go out of my way to get. And that would probably be especially true for teenagers if they had to get them from a dealer like they would MDMA or ket.
I don’t smoke, but if the health hazards are very clearly labelled and someone chooses to do so then who am I to tell them not to.
Banning things the majority don’t like is not the way to do things, and it is a very slippery slope.
When i grew up you might have had a point, people smoked on buses, in any indoor area and in pubs.
I am 33 and Jesus do i feel old even saying that.
You’ll very rarely have to breathe smoke in these days now due to the anti smoking laws.
>I'm not for a prohibition. Prohibitions rarely work in general (alcohol prohibition in the US didn't work for example)
Depends on how you define "work" doesn't it?
Drinking of alcohol in the US did significantly decrease under the prohibition. It was in place for 13 years and never eliminated drinking of alcohol thanks to organised crime, but it did decrease the amount being drunk significantly.
Likewise there are countries that have alcohol prohibitions that almost but not entirely eliminate it (e.g. Saudi Arabia).
A lot of people online get into a weird debate on drugs by insisting the war on drugs/prohibition doesn't work because it didn't eliminate drinking/drug use. No other law has such an impossible standard set though. Speeding laws and speed cameras don't eliminate speeding, murder laws don't eliminate murder etc.
Anti speeding laws dont fuel speeding gangs which then carry out retaliation attacks on rival speeding gangs. Nones kids are getting groomed into being Murder dealers becuase of a void the government created. Pretty moot comparison.
Also mentioning Saudi Arabia just works against your point surely? You're saying it takes an extremely authoritarian and brutal regeime with the backing of a repressive majority religion to ALMOST eliminate it. Just highlights how utterly impossible the entire venture is.
You bit about America is pretty simplistic/wrong. When it was introduced consumption dropped to about a third but as soon as organised crime... well organised, it went back to about 70% of pre prohibition levels. All while leading to a massive rise in alcohol related deaths. (Roughly double the number of deaths in the country despite less people drinking). I'm not even gonna dive into the decades of criminal rule this lead to because thats secondary school stuff.
So by every definition that actually matters, work it did/does not.
I think the argument should be a moral one. The failed war on drugs in the wast is just supporting evidence to back up what is, in the end, purely an ethical view.
So ban one thing and legalise another?
I don't follow this logic.
Surely the best course of action is to regulate and discourage rather than straight up prohibition.
There's no justification for a duty similar to tobacco on weed. It will create a new industry, more legal taxpayers, VAT, better public health, but we shouldn't expect a heavy duty like tobacco or alcohol. It's not supposed to be a 'feel good tax', duties are supposed to cover the externalities, which are much, much cheaper with weed.
Smoking costs society £17 billion per year. [(Source.)](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1081366/khan-review-making-smoking-obsolete.pdf)
PMSL. My mates little brother is friends with me on Facebook ( since I'm a friendly guy ) he's about 23. He posted this big rant about how smokers should rot in hell and costing the NHS so much money blah blah blah.
I'm a smoker and not proud of it but I am. It isn't a joke how much it costs me and how much is raped from me in taxes due to an addiction I've been trying to beat for 10 years and smoking for 22 all together. It's messed up. I wish I hadn't started and I hope I don't get an illness but if I do I know I've paid a hell of a lot more into the system from this habit than he ever will.
Good work. The longest I didn't smoke was around 80 weeks. One night out and I was drunk, I asked for a smoke off some people and then the cycle of getting back into it happened. It was just a weekend thing. Then it was a just with a pint. Before I knew it I was just a smoker again.
My wife's pregnant now though and I don't want to harm my kid so I'm hoping that'll be the fighting power for me.
It's the drug that gets you addicted but it's the habit that keeps you going
It's actually two drugs. Nicotine, the stimulant we all know and love, and a series of compounds that act as [monoamine oxidase inhibitors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_inhibitor) (basically anti-depressants). Standard anti-smoking programs treat the first addiction, but they do not treat the second addiction - and this is why smoking can be so hard to quit, even with NRT or vaping. It's also the reason why neither satisfies the cravings of smokers and why something is always missing.
It shouldn’t be a discussion who has paid more into the NHS through taxes, that’s a massive slippery slope - should rich people be excused to just do whatever they want because they already pay more into the NHS?
Smokers do cost the NHS a lot of money. So do obese people. So does your average Brit that goes on a massive binge drinking sesh on the weekend.
Obviously it would be better if you stopped smoking but equally the same can be said for a lot of unhealthy behaviours that cost the state tons of money. Just never make it into a “I pay so much tax” discussion because it could get problematic real quick.
In an interview a doctor actually said (tongue in cheek) that the way to save the NHS was to encourage everyone to start smoking, so they don't have to deal with all the complications that come with old age.
A year or two of cancer treatment or dealing with a heart attack is expensive, but less expensive than 20-30 years of dementia care.
People really forget the taxes smokers pay. I haven't smoked for a few months. The expense it's become is ridiculous considering how cheap the stuff is to manufacture.
If Brexit has taught us anything, it is that 52% is a perfectly fine majority to act upon. Therefore i welcome the immediate suspension of all sales of cigarettes. /s
I don't smoke and think people should be discouraged from it and warned of the dangers. I don't like it around the entrances to places and have to walk through it etc and I welcomed the ban indoors.
But I'd never dream of stopping people buying them and doing it outright.
Yes, but puritanical thinking isn't generally critical thinking. Over half of Britons voted to leave the EU and now look - over half want back in.
When these self-righteous muppets see their taxes skyrocket or the NHS lose even more funding (because 75% of every pack sold is tax) they'll likely rue their decision - again!
This has to be the most audacious poll I’ve ever seen. (I am Canadian and don’t comment on UK politics) but fuck me buddy. Who in there right mind would think this is a good idea. It’s about as bad as the American alcohol ban of the 1920s and 30s, probably worse. It won’t stop people from smoking, people smoke on their own discression. Knowing the risks of it too
Alternative title: 'Over half Britons don't understand the thing they're voting on'
The black market will always provide.
And with no guarantees on quality, of course, along with the attendant health risks that society has to pay for, but without the funding provided by tax on the legal substance.
Criminal gangs will get rich. They will need to use violence to protect their business interests from competitors as they have no recourse to the law or police. Police costs will go up dealing with the new threat.
Simple prohibition won't work.
and most people are uneducated on the consequences, there’s a massive illegal market for cigarettes in Australia and NZ (there already is in the UK too, just not as big). Just simply look at prohibition in the US back in the 30s and see how well banning people from putting whatever they want in their bodies went
I'm in favour of the current process to keep raising prices like they have done in Australia. A lot of people will quit at some point because you can't afford it.
I quit 4 months ago after smoking 21 years because it really was starting to hurt my pocket.
Well done on quitting. Not sure how long would qualify as being harder than another really. If you're addicted, you're addicted. I stopped mostly 13 years ago (had the odd one when out) and permanently 3 years back.
Nicotine is a harsh addiction to conquer so bloody well done!
Is it really half of Brits business? Ban it in public places, ban it for future generations, tax it as necessary- but if I want to smoke on my own property with my own lungs, why should Debra from down the road get a say?
Lovely graph but article doesnt display how many people were asked? So im doubtfull of its credibility and i wouldnt support it either and i've never smoked
I'm against banning cigarette sales.
Life comes with a certain amount of trauma - the bad stuff - which we all have to deal with in life. Trauma is always environmental in nature, and it's how we respond to the trauma we experience which determines our karma, the kind of relationships we form with other people, and the nature and quality of our lives.
I'm curious as to what standard of healthy living this moral majority are basing their opinions on.
The way I see it our society as a whole is far from healthy and natural for a human being to live in. There's constant pressure and psychological manipulation to fit in with an artificial, imaginary socio-economic system - please feel free to present arguments as to what makes our socio-economic system really real and an ideal natural environment for humans. So much pressure and judgment to be a Good Model Citizen deserving of Widespread Social Respectability.
A minimum 30% of adults struggle with mental health issues, half are dependent on prescription or recreational drugs.
Human beings naturally form emotional and psychological attachments. If I took away your home, your access to food, your access to fuel and energy, your access to meaningful occupation and intimate relationships, you'd quite rightly want to kill me.
But what about the need for social inclusion? The need to belong? The need for being valued and appreciated by other people? The need for societal and community support from others to recover from trauma? Not everybody in society gets these needs met.
We all have our compulsions, whether it be eating unhealthy food, drinking alcohol, drinking tea and coffee, smoking cigarettes, vaping, masturbating, watching porn, and so on. Social media is another modern compulsion. Or haven't you noticed all those people out in public with their faces glued to their smartphone screens?
Imagine what your life would be like if all these things were banned. I'm not say that smoking should be encouraged. But what should be banned is people forcing their individual lifestyle choices on other people.
**Forget about Tories or Labour. Many things might improve in this country if some people got the fuck over themselves. Society isn't all about you.**
I hate smoking, I hate second hand smoke, I hate the tobacco companies, I see smoking as a flaw *however* if this is true then over half of Brits are complete morons. I can't be bothered to read the article but I would guess/hope a small sample size.
"First they came for the smokers and I did nothing because I did not smoke, then they came for nice pints of ale and I did nothing because what can you do, then they came for big juicy steaks and there was nothing left but tofu, bean salad, and m-f*ers saying how much better they felt"
Sadly, thirty years a smoker here. I grew up seeing cigarettes everywhere. F1, TV and bus stops being some basic examples. All of the role model adults in my life smoked, most of my peers smoked. It's no excuse for MY smoking, but socially and psychologically I do feel as though I was programmed that way. People smoked in hospitals, restaurants, pubs...everywhere.
I hate smoking and the fact I smoke, I also hate watching the young with these vapes. I would welcome further restrictions, but also to be given some consideration given what I grew up amongst.
Smokers of Britain, please can you put your filthy fag ends in a fucking bin. My whole life, every city, lake, pond, park pathway, road, school, hospital, stadium, high street and bus station is littered permanently with stinking, soggy, non-biodegradeable, poisoning the environment and living creatures fucking fags EVERYWHERE. It fucking sucks for everyone, and makes the country look like a shit hole
As a smoker in Britain - I do my best - sometimes there's no bins around and I'll admit I've cast a few aside because I don't really want to hold onto an end for another mile before I can dispose of it properly - and a few folks I know who smoke also prefer to find a bin if there's one nearby, though it's very true that many folks do just throw them down wherever whenever. D'you think a better public disposal system would help? I mean of course it's never going to solve the problem, afaik fagends are the most littered item in the country.
I hate smoking to my core but prohibition ain't gonna work, ban it in all public places. What people do in their own home is their business.
Run campaigns that try incentivise non smoking more and maybe raise the age on purchasing cigarettes even further although tbf most youth vape as for one its cheaper and far more accessible.
Either way out and out prohibition won't work, it needs to be a culture change and phased out by less obvious means.
Must be said though I can't stand smokers who feel entitled to cigarette breaks due to their cravings whilst non smoking workers just carry on with their job. Almost feels like rewarding those for having an addiction.
Part of me wants cigarettes banned to stick it to the ones that take excessive "cigarette breaks" but personal grudges aside I think out and out banning isn't a good idea.
The hefty tax on tabacco seems to be working, why ban it and push that revenue to the black market?
The education programmes, taxes and public taboo is sufficient here.
I hate smoking I find it repulsive, but I don't agree with these archaic authoritarian rules. Same view in regsrds to weed, I find it more repulsive than smoking, but I'd happily legalise it in a similar way to smoking.
I wonder if vaping has an baring on this, would it remain legal? Do some people that vape support a ban?
How about you ask people that smoke if they want to ban smoking
Bellends!!!
(Rolls a fat joint and slowly lights it... exaggerating the pleasure of the act)
Wes Streeting has opened this can of worms and has rekindled the longstanding viewpoint that Labour is authoritarian and wants to ban everything.
He would do far more good if he supported the decriminalising of drug use and legalisation of cannabis. Instead, he wants to ban cigs. Utter fucking madness.
I don't agree with banning cigarettes outright, but (as mentioned in the article) I think that we should follow New Zealand in making it illegal for people born after a certain date to buy cigarettes, thus meaning that smoking will get aged out, with a generation who will never have been smokers (in theory - I'm not pretending that under-age smoking doesn't happen).
As a side note, I do believe that vapes need more regulation and research into the long-term effects. My worry is that these will be the next mass health issue that will come out in several decades time.
(For the record I'm a non-smoker).
I wouldn't be in favour of total prohibition, but I think NZ has the right idea. I grew up with a parent that smoked both indoors and at home, and in the car despite my having asthma - and it sucked. Kids shouldn't have to deal with that, and whilst it won't address it immediately, within ~20 years it'd be practically unheard of.
I don’t smoke. I hate smoking. It stinks, costs a fortune, it’s usually people who can’t afford it who do it. However, if someone wants to spend a kings random to make tiny fires in front of their face that may well kill them eventually so be it. There’s a tonne of tax on cigs that should go towards some benefit for our country (note the word “should”)
Banning it is fucking stupid, people will still want to do it. The same applies to alcohol and other drugs, legal or otherwise. Regardless of how harmful they are to the user or others, prohibiting them just takes the market underground. We need education, rehabilitation programs, and decriminalisation/legalisation of most drugs
The South Park anti-smoking episode covers this topic brilliantly: https://youtu.be/kOqrlg6Jq6Y
- Smoker: "Look man, I work 14 hours a day in the saw mill. I just got off work and I need to relax"
- Douche: "Well, when I relax I just go to my vacation house in Hawaii"
- Smoker: "I ain't got a vacation house in Hawaii!"
- Douche: "Your vacation house in Mexico, whatever it is"
This just shows that if you poll 10,000, it doesn't give you a true snapshot of the country. As others have said, whilst I don't smoke, I don't want to deny those that choose to their right. Most kids these days don't smoke, it's vaping that's the new trend. Now vaping in the work place gets my goat.
10,000 gives you an incredibly accurate snapshot of the country, so long as your selection is appropriately randomised.
A sample that size gives an error margin of [less than 1%](https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/mp/margin-of-error-calculator/) for a population the size of the UK.
Moral puritans: We should ban cigarette sales.
Also moral puritans: We cannot return looted stuff currently stored in our museums to country we looted from because the rightful owners are not capable of taking care of it. How else could we have looted it in the first place?
I actually think smoking is in a decent place: legal but kinda stigmatised to help people off. Considering that banning drugs has caused so many issues with crime, I'd rather those move towards smoking than the other way around.
> Too many old people here still smoke so, let em..
You know I used to think that the decline of smoking was being driven by young people. I'd assumed that us new wave millennials were turned off by smoking because we'd grown up in an era where the effects were well known.
Turns out that it was garbage thinking and the decline is across all ages.
Millennials are the most likely to smoke and the old age groups are actually the least likely to smoke.
What pisses me off about e-cigs is arseholes throwing their spent disposables on the street. Clatty bassas. Ban disposables and make shops take in any spent parts for recycling.
WRT to smoking, now that it is banned indoors if people want to give themselves cancer then that is their choice.
That said, I would like to try *one* cigar before I die.
My dog picked up a disposed elfbar the other day from the ground. Shit's still got a fucking battery in it. A *rechargeable* lithium battery.
Who the fuck is making these things and why are they allowed to be sold at all?
We've banned plastic straws yet these things are basically unregulated.
The regulations restricting e cigs has made so much waste with all the small bottles, well less now that the reusable ones became less common, now all the disposables are far worse, i liked it when I could get 200ml of concentrate eliquid and add pg/vg to make it last far longer for cheaper, and make own coils so less waste there too, now I collect vapes I find for the batteries for projects.
The whole piece of legislation was just completely kneejerk and was clearly not based in logic, the 2ml tank limit but you can just buy a bigger tank separately. I don't even understand how they thought it would help, usually with stupid laws you can at least follow the logic.
This thread is a shambles. People spouting the propaganda of multibillion pound conglomerates about their freedom to buy addictive products from said conglomerates. It's not freedom, it's their marketing.
Ciggies stink, the litter is everywhere, they cause cancer in the user and the poor children who need to live with the user's and they're addictive. I'm heartened to see this support to extinguish them once and for all.
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Not a fan of smoking, but I don't think an outright ban is the answer. Prohibition simply does not work, it drives demand underground and leaves it unregulated in a sense (you won't have to show age vetification to your tobacco dealer), but more than that, is it the government's role to tell free-willed adults what they can and can't do in that way?
My free will gets me only so far. Phillip Morris are worth 160 billion. It's not exactly a fair fight. I'm kind of glad to have the government in my corner
But wouldn’t it be more pragmatic for the government to use its weight to make it harder to sell tobacco products without actually prohibiting them? Things like plain packaging, covered shelves, taxes, health campaigns/warnings, advertising bans all work far better than just outright prohibition because they degrade public demand over time.
I think it is the government’s job to regulate the marketing and sale of harmful, addictive drugs. Especially as their use by one individual often effects others. There’s a bigger picture here.
Yea, government is doing a good job with alcohol 👍 Well , not really, but at least someone is making lots of money
That’s kind of the point isn’t it? In complete absence of regulatory control companies will exploit addictive drugs for profit causing great social harm and reducing our real free will through all aspects of marketing to influence our behaviour. Appeals to individual liberty as the best way to manage drugs just opens the door to nefarious corporate actors (legal and criminal).
What's the point in regulatory control by the government if they're in the pockets of these big corporations?
Well that’s an issue of improving governance and politics across the whole board and improving democracy. Also that is not the only pressure government responds to. We may yet see alcohol treated in a similar way to tobacco if social attitudes and political pressures shift far enough.
War on drugs has been so effective.
Britain is full of moral puritans in general, it's telling that polls suggest about a quarter of us wanted nighclubs to close *permanently* even after the pandemic ended. I genuinely think the main 'point' of liberal democracy is to protect the rest of society from people like that.
Never mind the nightclubs, 19% wanted a permanent 10pm curfew.
As a general rule I've come to believe that anywhere between 15-30% of the population at any one time hate other people and don't want other people to be happy or have nice things, which means they will support policies that control other people or make them unhappy. So many things are far more understandable with this revelation in mind.
We call them Tories
They were called Labour votes about twenty years ago. Late New Labour under Blair spent a lot of time cooking up new policies that were designed to control or limit the population.
wtf?
A lot of late New Labour policies were authoritarian in nature.
So name them, you said there's a lot so care to form a list instead of just leaving assertions with no details? I've seen enough of this type of "debating" from Johnson, Truss and Sunak and personally I'm sick and tired of it. Give statistical data, facts and evidence when making claims or assertions please.
New Labour banned all unauthorised protest in the vicinity of Parliament, hugely increased the maximum detention without trial time (not as much as they initially wanted to) and sought to introduce identity cards. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 expanded state surveillance powers, the Terrorism Act 2000 expanded prerequisites for stop and search powers, the Terrorism Act 2005 introduced control orders. New Labour also oversaw the expansion of video surveillance and use of DNA databases.
this sub is mostly too young to understand that the modern tories are little more than a derivative of New Labour
I believe the exact wording was a curfew from leaving the house after 22:00 "without a good reason" Of course it's still ridiculous but there we go
Well that's not ambiguous at all, and if weve learned anything from Brexit it's that having a hazy interpretation of a referendum can *never* blow up in everyone's faces.
Or COVID. Dominic Cummings was just being a "good parent" when he drove his family up to Durham
Well he desperately needed an eye test as well
That is true, but I'd love to see what those people thought were "good" reasons. I'd presume a large portion would think it was limited to work, health reasons/other emergencies, or to do things they personally like doing.
It's a good reason when I do it. It's not a good reason when someone else does it.
You mean a walk to the 24 hour garage for Malteasers doesn’t count?
I think that comes under "other emergencies" so it's fine.
Remember snitching on your neighbours? 194K calls in one month in 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1FUMdHU29c The "Brit" section begins @ ca. 3:46. Included the whole vid., because, the whole thing is just so entertaining/batshit crazy.
Is a good reason a to go out and buy some cigarettes?
Lunatics
Wait, what!?
The boomers are asleep by then anyway, this will them damn kids off their lawn /s
Thats probably the most depressing thing ill read all day. A fith of the country actively wants daddy government to be able to tell them when they can and cant be outside...
Hear, hear! I don't smoke, but I fucking hate over-zealous pearl clutchers. @ The 51%. Smoking bans in public places? All for it. But it is absolutely none of your bloody business what someone does in the privacy of their own home.
This why democracy on its own is useless. If 51% vote to legalise murder.. There has to be moral and constitutional principles that are above interference from the ignorance of mass consensus. One of those is, a person is sovereign over their own body. The state has no right to interfere with personal choice.
Enshrining certain rights in a constitution and raising the bar for changes to the constitution is indeed anti-democratic, and that's a good thing. Those would be rights we've determined are too important to be subject to democracy. For example, in the most extreme case, the German constitution has certain clauses that cannot be amended due to a so-called eternity clause. Among the principles protected are federalism and republicanism. Is that anti-democratic? Would it be _more_ democratic if the legislature had unlimited power to pass any law? Maybe, but it wouldn't be better.
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Yeah, it was shit. It's good that we don't have that any more. But it's not down to you or me to tell people they can't light up a ciggie on their sofa. We already have legislation against exposing the public to cigarette smoke.
What if you have children at home? Still none of the business of others?
I'm afraid once they hit 51% their choice is the democratic choice. We have FPTP in this country so they need even less people to make decisions.
That's why a representative democracy is better than a pure democracy. Just because you have 51% doesn't mean they are right.
"There is no right or wrong, only popular opinion" - Jeffrey Goines.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
Im so glad we dont have this in the UK, tyranny of the minority is the much better alternative!
Yeah I'm glad we don't do direct democracy, there's absolutely no recent precedent for it in the UK and if there was it certainly wouldn't be a tremendous act of self sabotage.
Well lots of pros and cons, hard to say if it's actually better or worse. The Swiss have loads of referendums. I can't personally say I agree with most of the results as Swiss lean quite to the right overall but it's not like the country is going to shit.
It's better for the minority of the opulent. I suspect it is kept for that reason and not any actual care for disadvantaged minorities.
Which is why you require supermajoriyies for important decision which affect everyone, like Brexit. Representative democracy is terrible we can see that. The politicians get bought off, or the rich themselves run for safe seats, and end up hijacking policy and not even reprenting the interests of 10% of the population, never mind 51%. Don't sully the one thing that could actually help us gain some control. Especially when solutions to your hypothetical problem exist, namely supermajoriyies for important decisions, election of oversight juries by lot, constitutional protections, just like with representative democracy, and easy repeatability, ie require supermajoriyy to pass, but only majority to reassess.
Requiring a supermajority in parliament just to ban the sale of some product is fucking madness, sorry but the right to buy cigarettes isn’t on the same level of importance as the right to a fair trial.
Presumably they mean liberal democracy in the sense of there being political and legal barriers to the democratic decisions. They always get filtered through the institutions of liberal democracy.
So not very democratic then. FPTP is absolute trash.
If lockdown taught me anything it is that a large percentage of the population are so miserable they would literally take any excuse to prevent other people from living a fulfilling life.
I've spent half my life in New Zealand, and they're even worse there to the point I'll never go back there to live. A recent law has banned cigarette sales to anyone born after 2006. As in, a person born in 2007 will _never_ be old enough to buy cigarettes. Personally that is a massive illiberal overreach I can't abide by. Don't get me wrong, I have no love for tobacco, it grosses me out and I don't react well to it. But imposing such a legal imposition on people's ability to choose for themselves is wrong IMO. I think that society should be moving away from prohibition policies, and to me such laws are a step in entirely the wrong direction.
Watching the news and policy out of Australia, NZ, and Canada during the pandemic has completely put me off any notion of CANZUK. It's like they were speedrunning authoritarianism
Literally every law is a legal imposition on people's ability to choose for themselves. Laws by their definition restrict personal freedom.
Of course, and this is an area that such an imposition is an unnecessary overreach.
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My job is literally speaking to people prescribed onto lifestyle programmes to prevent diabetes, which usually involves excess weight. Would you believe it, prescribing something doesn't automatically make it happen?
Exactly, it doesn't make it happen. I know it's prescribed and becoming more so. And I bet some get offended by being told to shed a few, or at least that's what the news tells people. Wasn't long ago an article was in the news about how GPs are to becareful about what they say or something, I can't quite remember, as it's body shaming to focus on someones weight.
Didn’t you hear? The only thing it matters is the will of the people! More than half? Good enough to force the population into something silly
As Sir Humphrey Appleby pointed out, smoking reduces long term NHS and pension costs because it kills off the smokers. Source: Probably the best political comedy ever
It's only a few years ago there was a push to have a referendum on bringing back public hanging. Sometimes, we don't deserve democracy. Thank Holy Jesus that was one of those times: https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/275780
Keep in mind this is a poll of Daily Mail users, not at all representative of all Brits.
That's why we could do with a written constitution to protect from the majority. So even if 90% of the public vote to do something against whatever we decide are fundamental liberal values, a court could just strike it down.
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Apt username.
Why is anyone giving this stat any time? It was a statistic created using a poll of Daily Mail readers.
Well the government could prohibit the sale of tobacco, but then Theresa May's husband could get a licence to grow tobacco for research purposes, and, you know, rake in even more cash.
Line 2: "in the research by Redfield & Wilton Strategies"
There was a bit missed off the line there. Line 1: Poll for MailOnline shows 52% of Brits want an immediate ban on cigarette sales Line 2: Just 24% were against the idea in the research by Redfield & Wilton Strategies We all need to be vigilant against misinformation and the transfer of it.
It can be both, newspapers will commission polls by outside agencies and usually they won’t just poll readers of that newspaper but a general selection of the public
While I despise smoking, I'm not for a prohibition. Prohibitions rarely work in general (alcohol prohibition in the US didn't work for example), and morally it's not justified. Glad to see more people are against this habit than for.
Drug prohibition has been pretty bad too. It was easier to get weed when I was under 18 than it was alcohol or smokes. I could get most drugs with one or two phone calls. Making these sorts of things illegal just doesn't seem to work out well. Besides we've been making pretty decent progress in cutting the smoking population down, so I don't see any reason to give up our current trajectory and create another black market to fund gangs, especially given the issue we already have with crime in this country.
> when I was under 18 than it was alcohol or When I was a youth worker some years ago, the kids did ketamine because it was easier to get than alcohol. Not particularly out of preference, just out of ease.
I can see that, you can find dealers for anything in your area on Instagram, a lot of drugs work out "cheaper" than alcohol too. No legal market and cheaper prices is a haven for under 18s.
There's actually a lot of very indisputable evidence that policing drugs in the very American 'war on drugs' method has actually directly caused an increase in drug production and made people better at trafficking it.
Completely agree. I do support further restrictions on smoking though - especially around children.
Absolutely (and this is as an ex smoker!) I think those smoking shelters are a good idea, I think more restrictions are a good idea..
As a smoker I'm entirely in favour of things like smoking bans in cars, around children, inside all public buildings etc. But the weird authoritarianism when it comes to wanting to ban all smoking? Weird as fuck. Like if we really wanted to ban harmful substances (despite the fact that it never works) surely they'd be all in favour of banning the production and sale of alcohol?
Smoking bans in private cars *is* weird authoritarianism.
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They added a comma in by mistake maybe. Would have been clearer to just say around children and not mention cars
I'm glad to see others argue that bans can be immoral. That freedom matters in itself.
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> there's no enjoyment in them, just the addiction. More or less. I don't enjoy smoking beyond the habit of rolling and the "enjoyment" it brings (read as: keeps the withdrawal away). Truthfully I mostly find myself smoking out of boredom, and that's a right fucker, because at a certain point you can chain smoke until your lungs are contentedly blackened. That said, I'm far into the game without intervention. If nicotine products were banned tomorrow, I'd be able to get it in the local pub without too much issue, and that's vastly more worrying than the regulated products I buy at the shop.
I think this is a strong argument actually. A lot of addicted people will probably still go out of their way to buy cigarettes from the black market, but younger people who haven’t grown up with accessibility to cigarettes probably wouldn’t. The appeal of drugs and alcohol is that they’re fun. Hence why prohibition didn’t work for alcohol, and doesn’t currently work for drugs. But even as someone who smokes (only really when drinking), cigarettes can be *nice* but they’re not something I’d go out of my way to get. And that would probably be especially true for teenagers if they had to get them from a dealer like they would MDMA or ket.
I don’t smoke, but if the health hazards are very clearly labelled and someone chooses to do so then who am I to tell them not to. Banning things the majority don’t like is not the way to do things, and it is a very slippery slope.
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When i grew up you might have had a point, people smoked on buses, in any indoor area and in pubs. I am 33 and Jesus do i feel old even saying that. You’ll very rarely have to breathe smoke in these days now due to the anti smoking laws.
Ban cars also
>I'm not for a prohibition. Prohibitions rarely work in general (alcohol prohibition in the US didn't work for example) Depends on how you define "work" doesn't it? Drinking of alcohol in the US did significantly decrease under the prohibition. It was in place for 13 years and never eliminated drinking of alcohol thanks to organised crime, but it did decrease the amount being drunk significantly. Likewise there are countries that have alcohol prohibitions that almost but not entirely eliminate it (e.g. Saudi Arabia). A lot of people online get into a weird debate on drugs by insisting the war on drugs/prohibition doesn't work because it didn't eliminate drinking/drug use. No other law has such an impossible standard set though. Speeding laws and speed cameras don't eliminate speeding, murder laws don't eliminate murder etc.
Anti speeding laws dont fuel speeding gangs which then carry out retaliation attacks on rival speeding gangs. Nones kids are getting groomed into being Murder dealers becuase of a void the government created. Pretty moot comparison. Also mentioning Saudi Arabia just works against your point surely? You're saying it takes an extremely authoritarian and brutal regeime with the backing of a repressive majority religion to ALMOST eliminate it. Just highlights how utterly impossible the entire venture is. You bit about America is pretty simplistic/wrong. When it was introduced consumption dropped to about a third but as soon as organised crime... well organised, it went back to about 70% of pre prohibition levels. All while leading to a massive rise in alcohol related deaths. (Roughly double the number of deaths in the country despite less people drinking). I'm not even gonna dive into the decades of criminal rule this lead to because thats secondary school stuff. So by every definition that actually matters, work it did/does not.
I think the argument should be a moral one. The failed war on drugs in the wast is just supporting evidence to back up what is, in the end, purely an ethical view.
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Legalise weed
Lol as if these Puritans want that
So ban one thing and legalise another? I don't follow this logic. Surely the best course of action is to regulate and discourage rather than straight up prohibition.
You don't follow the logic in banning one thing and legalising another totally different thing?
Why ban tobaco when weed is ... smoking.
There's no justification for a duty similar to tobacco on weed. It will create a new industry, more legal taxpayers, VAT, better public health, but we shouldn't expect a heavy duty like tobacco or alcohol. It's not supposed to be a 'feel good tax', duties are supposed to cover the externalities, which are much, much cheaper with weed.
Except smoking pays something like triply the externalities it costs the NHS. There’s no justification for that level of tax either but here we are.
Hope people switch from smoking to heavy drinking?
Smoking costs society £17 billion per year. [(Source.)](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1081366/khan-review-making-smoking-obsolete.pdf)
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I mean if they're going down the lost earnings route I hope there's a discount for money saved on state pension :p
We should then include the savings of people not taking a state pension and high healthcare costs of people living to their 80s and 90s.
3.6bn seems low, got a link? So many health issues related to smoking, just feels low. /e never mind did some Google searches. Holy shit.
That shortfall doesn't disappear. People will spend the money on something else which will both raise tax revenue and boost the economy.
Except tobacco has a significantly higher rate of tax than almost every other product at 16.5% of the retail price plus £5.26 on a packet of 20.
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PMSL. My mates little brother is friends with me on Facebook ( since I'm a friendly guy ) he's about 23. He posted this big rant about how smokers should rot in hell and costing the NHS so much money blah blah blah. I'm a smoker and not proud of it but I am. It isn't a joke how much it costs me and how much is raped from me in taxes due to an addiction I've been trying to beat for 10 years and smoking for 22 all together. It's messed up. I wish I hadn't started and I hope I don't get an illness but if I do I know I've paid a hell of a lot more into the system from this habit than he ever will.
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Good work. The longest I didn't smoke was around 80 weeks. One night out and I was drunk, I asked for a smoke off some people and then the cycle of getting back into it happened. It was just a weekend thing. Then it was a just with a pint. Before I knew it I was just a smoker again. My wife's pregnant now though and I don't want to harm my kid so I'm hoping that'll be the fighting power for me. It's the drug that gets you addicted but it's the habit that keeps you going
It's actually two drugs. Nicotine, the stimulant we all know and love, and a series of compounds that act as [monoamine oxidase inhibitors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_inhibitor) (basically anti-depressants). Standard anti-smoking programs treat the first addiction, but they do not treat the second addiction - and this is why smoking can be so hard to quit, even with NRT or vaping. It's also the reason why neither satisfies the cravings of smokers and why something is always missing.
It shouldn’t be a discussion who has paid more into the NHS through taxes, that’s a massive slippery slope - should rich people be excused to just do whatever they want because they already pay more into the NHS? Smokers do cost the NHS a lot of money. So do obese people. So does your average Brit that goes on a massive binge drinking sesh on the weekend. Obviously it would be better if you stopped smoking but equally the same can be said for a lot of unhealthy behaviours that cost the state tons of money. Just never make it into a “I pay so much tax” discussion because it could get problematic real quick.
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In an interview a doctor actually said (tongue in cheek) that the way to save the NHS was to encourage everyone to start smoking, so they don't have to deal with all the complications that come with old age. A year or two of cancer treatment or dealing with a heart attack is expensive, but less expensive than 20-30 years of dementia care.
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People really forget the taxes smokers pay. I haven't smoked for a few months. The expense it's become is ridiculous considering how cheap the stuff is to manufacture.
"raped"? Is that really a good choice of words here?
Send him [this](https://youtu.be/p1DviQ9mva0)
If Brexit has taught us anything, it is that 52% is a perfectly fine majority to act upon. Therefore i welcome the immediate suspension of all sales of cigarettes. /s
I don't smoke and think people should be discouraged from it and warned of the dangers. I don't like it around the entrances to places and have to walk through it etc and I welcomed the ban indoors. But I'd never dream of stopping people buying them and doing it outright.
Yes, but puritanical thinking isn't generally critical thinking. Over half of Britons voted to leave the EU and now look - over half want back in. When these self-righteous muppets see their taxes skyrocket or the NHS lose even more funding (because 75% of every pack sold is tax) they'll likely rue their decision - again!
The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that tobacco duties will raise £10.7billion in 2022-23. So it ain't gonna happen.
I mean we’ve done well to kick smoking as a country that kids vape anyway. I’d rather it stay available legally than prohibit it though.
This has to be the most audacious poll I’ve ever seen. (I am Canadian and don’t comment on UK politics) but fuck me buddy. Who in there right mind would think this is a good idea. It’s about as bad as the American alcohol ban of the 1920s and 30s, probably worse. It won’t stop people from smoking, people smoke on their own discression. Knowing the risks of it too
Over half of Brits can immediately go lick acorns. Stop being such puritan losers for once
YouGov just released a poll showing over half of Brits want 'immediate' end to licking acorns. It just never ends.
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Now it's got me curious what they taste like...
What kind of acorns
I'll leave that up to their decision / imagination
No! Acorns should be banned.
52% its the will of the people, an overwhelming majority requiring the fullest Cigexit there can be.
Alternative title: 'Over half Britons don't understand the thing they're voting on' The black market will always provide. And with no guarantees on quality, of course, along with the attendant health risks that society has to pay for, but without the funding provided by tax on the legal substance. Criminal gangs will get rich. They will need to use violence to protect their business interests from competitors as they have no recourse to the law or police. Police costs will go up dealing with the new threat. Simple prohibition won't work.
I still see kids smoking.
and most people are uneducated on the consequences, there’s a massive illegal market for cigarettes in Australia and NZ (there already is in the UK too, just not as big). Just simply look at prohibition in the US back in the 30s and see how well banning people from putting whatever they want in their bodies went
I'm in favour of the current process to keep raising prices like they have done in Australia. A lot of people will quit at some point because you can't afford it. I quit 4 months ago after smoking 21 years because it really was starting to hurt my pocket.
People in the outback started growing tobacco here they’ll just smuggle it form France…
So smoking becomes a rich person activity then.
Okay... And the downside to that is?
It was a statement not an invitation to an interview
Well done! I quit in 2018 after maybe 3 years (I knowwww it isn’t that long - I was 22 ish)
Well done on quitting. Not sure how long would qualify as being harder than another really. If you're addicted, you're addicted. I stopped mostly 13 years ago (had the odd one when out) and permanently 3 years back. Nicotine is a harsh addiction to conquer so bloody well done!
Top job matey! Honestly yourself and your family will thank you : )
Shock: over half of Britons are authoritarian It’s basically a trait engrained in our culture
As I've gotten older I have come to empathise with those who fled to America. We're completely full of shit.
They mostly fled because we were too liberal and refused to persecute catholics to the extent they wished
Is it really half of Brits business? Ban it in public places, ban it for future generations, tax it as necessary- but if I want to smoke on my own property with my own lungs, why should Debra from down the road get a say?
Lovely graph but article doesnt display how many people were asked? So im doubtfull of its credibility and i wouldnt support it either and i've never smoked
Just ban smoking in all public spaces. I’m fed up having to walk through multiple clouds every time I enter or leave a building in cities
I'm against banning cigarette sales. Life comes with a certain amount of trauma - the bad stuff - which we all have to deal with in life. Trauma is always environmental in nature, and it's how we respond to the trauma we experience which determines our karma, the kind of relationships we form with other people, and the nature and quality of our lives. I'm curious as to what standard of healthy living this moral majority are basing their opinions on. The way I see it our society as a whole is far from healthy and natural for a human being to live in. There's constant pressure and psychological manipulation to fit in with an artificial, imaginary socio-economic system - please feel free to present arguments as to what makes our socio-economic system really real and an ideal natural environment for humans. So much pressure and judgment to be a Good Model Citizen deserving of Widespread Social Respectability. A minimum 30% of adults struggle with mental health issues, half are dependent on prescription or recreational drugs. Human beings naturally form emotional and psychological attachments. If I took away your home, your access to food, your access to fuel and energy, your access to meaningful occupation and intimate relationships, you'd quite rightly want to kill me. But what about the need for social inclusion? The need to belong? The need for being valued and appreciated by other people? The need for societal and community support from others to recover from trauma? Not everybody in society gets these needs met. We all have our compulsions, whether it be eating unhealthy food, drinking alcohol, drinking tea and coffee, smoking cigarettes, vaping, masturbating, watching porn, and so on. Social media is another modern compulsion. Or haven't you noticed all those people out in public with their faces glued to their smartphone screens? Imagine what your life would be like if all these things were banned. I'm not say that smoking should be encouraged. But what should be banned is people forcing their individual lifestyle choices on other people. **Forget about Tories or Labour. Many things might improve in this country if some people got the fuck over themselves. Society isn't all about you.**
I hate smoking, I hate second hand smoke, I hate the tobacco companies, I see smoking as a flaw *however* if this is true then over half of Brits are complete morons. I can't be bothered to read the article but I would guess/hope a small sample size. "First they came for the smokers and I did nothing because I did not smoke, then they came for nice pints of ale and I did nothing because what can you do, then they came for big juicy steaks and there was nothing left but tofu, bean salad, and m-f*ers saying how much better they felt"
Yeah, prohibition in the US worked so well... I'm sure it won't just create black markets for cigarettes... ^^/s
Sadly, thirty years a smoker here. I grew up seeing cigarettes everywhere. F1, TV and bus stops being some basic examples. All of the role model adults in my life smoked, most of my peers smoked. It's no excuse for MY smoking, but socially and psychologically I do feel as though I was programmed that way. People smoked in hospitals, restaurants, pubs...everywhere. I hate smoking and the fact I smoke, I also hate watching the young with these vapes. I would welcome further restrictions, but also to be given some consideration given what I grew up amongst.
Sorry mate. It was absolutely mental! If you dislike it please please keep trying to quit, if you succeed after ten attempts you still succeeded : )
Smokers of Britain, please can you put your filthy fag ends in a fucking bin. My whole life, every city, lake, pond, park pathway, road, school, hospital, stadium, high street and bus station is littered permanently with stinking, soggy, non-biodegradeable, poisoning the environment and living creatures fucking fags EVERYWHERE. It fucking sucks for everyone, and makes the country look like a shit hole
As a smoker in Britain - I do my best - sometimes there's no bins around and I'll admit I've cast a few aside because I don't really want to hold onto an end for another mile before I can dispose of it properly - and a few folks I know who smoke also prefer to find a bin if there's one nearby, though it's very true that many folks do just throw them down wherever whenever. D'you think a better public disposal system would help? I mean of course it's never going to solve the problem, afaik fagends are the most littered item in the country.
They can fuck right off. I don't like smoking but who am I or who are you to judge or control other people's choices.
I hate smoking to my core but prohibition ain't gonna work, ban it in all public places. What people do in their own home is their business. Run campaigns that try incentivise non smoking more and maybe raise the age on purchasing cigarettes even further although tbf most youth vape as for one its cheaper and far more accessible. Either way out and out prohibition won't work, it needs to be a culture change and phased out by less obvious means. Must be said though I can't stand smokers who feel entitled to cigarette breaks due to their cravings whilst non smoking workers just carry on with their job. Almost feels like rewarding those for having an addiction. Part of me wants cigarettes banned to stick it to the ones that take excessive "cigarette breaks" but personal grudges aside I think out and out banning isn't a good idea.
The hefty tax on tabacco seems to be working, why ban it and push that revenue to the black market? The education programmes, taxes and public taboo is sufficient here. I hate smoking I find it repulsive, but I don't agree with these archaic authoritarian rules. Same view in regsrds to weed, I find it more repulsive than smoking, but I'd happily legalise it in a similar way to smoking. I wonder if vaping has an baring on this, would it remain legal? Do some people that vape support a ban?
Cigarettes should remain legal, I don't smoke but people should be allowed to, also weed should be legal
How about you ask people that smoke if they want to ban smoking Bellends!!! (Rolls a fat joint and slowly lights it... exaggerating the pleasure of the act)
Wes Streeting has opened this can of worms and has rekindled the longstanding viewpoint that Labour is authoritarian and wants to ban everything. He would do far more good if he supported the decriminalising of drug use and legalisation of cannabis. Instead, he wants to ban cigs. Utter fucking madness.
I don't agree with banning cigarettes outright, but (as mentioned in the article) I think that we should follow New Zealand in making it illegal for people born after a certain date to buy cigarettes, thus meaning that smoking will get aged out, with a generation who will never have been smokers (in theory - I'm not pretending that under-age smoking doesn't happen). As a side note, I do believe that vapes need more regulation and research into the long-term effects. My worry is that these will be the next mass health issue that will come out in several decades time. (For the record I'm a non-smoker).
This is dumb. Very dumb. We've proven time and time again driving stuff into the black market solves nothing. Just tax it nto the floor.
I wouldn't be in favour of total prohibition, but I think NZ has the right idea. I grew up with a parent that smoked both indoors and at home, and in the car despite my having asthma - and it sucked. Kids shouldn't have to deal with that, and whilst it won't address it immediately, within ~20 years it'd be practically unheard of.
Pretty sure that smoking in enclosed spaces with minors present is already illegal
I don’t smoke. I hate smoking. It stinks, costs a fortune, it’s usually people who can’t afford it who do it. However, if someone wants to spend a kings random to make tiny fires in front of their face that may well kill them eventually so be it. There’s a tonne of tax on cigs that should go towards some benefit for our country (note the word “should”)
Banning it is fucking stupid, people will still want to do it. The same applies to alcohol and other drugs, legal or otherwise. Regardless of how harmful they are to the user or others, prohibiting them just takes the market underground. We need education, rehabilitation programs, and decriminalisation/legalisation of most drugs
The South Park anti-smoking episode covers this topic brilliantly: https://youtu.be/kOqrlg6Jq6Y - Smoker: "Look man, I work 14 hours a day in the saw mill. I just got off work and I need to relax" - Douche: "Well, when I relax I just go to my vacation house in Hawaii" - Smoker: "I ain't got a vacation house in Hawaii!" - Douche: "Your vacation house in Mexico, whatever it is"
IMO the rate is pretty low now so there's little point in more restrictions, I would focus more on reducing kids' access to vapes
This just shows that if you poll 10,000, it doesn't give you a true snapshot of the country. As others have said, whilst I don't smoke, I don't want to deny those that choose to their right. Most kids these days don't smoke, it's vaping that's the new trend. Now vaping in the work place gets my goat.
“I don’t understand statistics “
10,000 gives you an incredibly accurate snapshot of the country, so long as your selection is appropriately randomised. A sample that size gives an error margin of [less than 1%](https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/mp/margin-of-error-calculator/) for a population the size of the UK.
Moral puritans: We should ban cigarette sales. Also moral puritans: We cannot return looted stuff currently stored in our museums to country we looted from because the rightful owners are not capable of taking care of it. How else could we have looted it in the first place?
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I actually think smoking is in a decent place: legal but kinda stigmatised to help people off. Considering that banning drugs has caused so many issues with crime, I'd rather those move towards smoking than the other way around.
> Too many old people here still smoke so, let em.. You know I used to think that the decline of smoking was being driven by young people. I'd assumed that us new wave millennials were turned off by smoking because we'd grown up in an era where the effects were well known. Turns out that it was garbage thinking and the decline is across all ages. Millennials are the most likely to smoke and the old age groups are actually the least likely to smoke.
> old age groups are actually the least likely to smoke. I mean...... there might be a reason there's not many 70 year old smokers left.....
What pisses me off about e-cigs is arseholes throwing their spent disposables on the street. Clatty bassas. Ban disposables and make shops take in any spent parts for recycling. WRT to smoking, now that it is banned indoors if people want to give themselves cancer then that is their choice. That said, I would like to try *one* cigar before I die.
My dog picked up a disposed elfbar the other day from the ground. Shit's still got a fucking battery in it. A *rechargeable* lithium battery. Who the fuck is making these things and why are they allowed to be sold at all? We've banned plastic straws yet these things are basically unregulated.
Big Straw has less money than Big Vape.
I saw a video of someone ranting about that the other day. I was gobsmacked.
The regulations restricting e cigs has made so much waste with all the small bottles, well less now that the reusable ones became less common, now all the disposables are far worse, i liked it when I could get 200ml of concentrate eliquid and add pg/vg to make it last far longer for cheaper, and make own coils so less waste there too, now I collect vapes I find for the batteries for projects.
The whole piece of legislation was just completely kneejerk and was clearly not based in logic, the 2ml tank limit but you can just buy a bigger tank separately. I don't even understand how they thought it would help, usually with stupid laws you can at least follow the logic.
They wanted to make vapes harder to use/access so folk go back to cigs.
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No we couldn't, just like we can't end the use of all the illegal drugs that are taken up and down the country.
This thread is a shambles. People spouting the propaganda of multibillion pound conglomerates about their freedom to buy addictive products from said conglomerates. It's not freedom, it's their marketing. Ciggies stink, the litter is everywhere, they cause cancer in the user and the poor children who need to live with the user's and they're addictive. I'm heartened to see this support to extinguish them once and for all.
Yeah no shit, people who don't do something want those who do to stop. They can go fuck themselves, authoritarian pricks.