Or phrased differently, "we don't know how to stop it without causing something worse".
Outright prohibition is massively expensive (prisons, police, loss of taxes), is a gift to criminals who will grow/import it illegally and sell it, and has outsized negative consequences on the people who use it anyways.
Partial prohibition (under X years of age), taxes, and public education work to reduce the amount of it, without most of the negative side effects, so we did those. If you could point at other measures that would further reduce the usage, which didn't come with huge drawbacks, I'm pretty sure we would jump on that as well. Unfortunately, it's not clear any such measures exist.
“Suppose, for example, that a legislator should feel himself authorized to undertake the extirpation of drunkenness and fornication by direct laws. He would have to begin by a multitude of regulations. The first inconvenience would therefore be a complexity of laws. The easier it is to conceal these vices, the more necessary it would be to resort to severity of punishment, in order to destroy by the terror of examples the constantly recurring hope of impunity. This excessive rigour of laws forms a second inconvenience not less grave than the first. The difficulty of procuring proofs would be such that it would be necessary to encourage informers, and to entertain an army of spies. This necessity forms a third inconvenience, greater than either of the others.
“Let us compare the results of good and evil. Offenses of this nature, if that name can be properly given to imprudences, produces no alarm; but the pretended remedy would spread a universal terror. Innocent or guilty, everyone would fear for himself or his connections; suspicions and accusations would render society dangerous; we should fly from it, we should involve ourselves in mystery and concealment, we should shun all the disclosures of confidence. Instead of suppressing one vice, the laws would produce other vices, new and more dangerous.”
That will be an interesting experiment to watch in the years to come.
I have my doubts that it will work, or at least that it would work here (in Canada). When I was in high school I knew too many people who were smoking illegally for me to think that you could just slowly creep the law up the age groups and not end up with a thriving black market. Hopefully I will be proven wrong though!
To describe why I think this is unlikely to work in another way, I think banning it for young people is really only effective because they have almost no money, and the illegal sales to supply them mostly aren't done through criminal gangs using it to fund terrible things, but slightly older people who are just using it to earn a little extra money. Both of those break down once you start banning it for older people, even if it's always been illegal for them.
That is making the same mistake of many here and the author of the linked article, which is equating smoking cigarettes to smoking tobacco. Smoking tobacco may not be healthy, but it is not nearly as lethal as smoking (national brand and major brand) cigarettes, because cigarettes include a lot of extra stuff that is not tobacco, namely, an infusion of 300+ known carcinogens in order to increase addictiveness.
What should be banned and made illegal is the method Big Tobacco uses to process tobacco into such a lethal product [1]. If we banned this process, but permitted manufacture, sale and consumption of smoking products containing only unadulterated natural (i.e. no additives except water) tobacco, within 10-20 years, the mortality rates of smokers would plummet and return to what they were prior to the chemical revolution of the 1950s, which is probably far less though we don't know by how much because the studies only appeared after the chemical revolution.
Do like the state of Hawaii was going to do, and just gradually increase the minimum age to purchase, until it's up to 100. If you live to 100 and still want to smoke, go for it.
IMO, the principle is sound, but you could certainly argue about the rate at which the age should increase. 1 year per year seems like it would do the least harm overall.
This, to me, is the only compelling reason. Prohibition is almost always worse. Even just prohibition of production -- not use -- has substantial negative externalities.
Almost every other argument is absurd on-face. Even base appeals to "freedom" fall flat given the significant secondary and tertiary effects of smoke exposure, as well as the huge cost imposed on society by smoking.
On your last point, from what I've seen smoking saves society money because it kills people at much younger ages so governments don't have to pay for their health care for nearly as long.
I think if the op was talking about non-monetary costs.
But if we're limiting this to monetary costs only, I believe you're right. I saw a similar study from the UK circa ~2008ish that compared long term smoker/obese/healthy medical costs, and healthy people are indeed the most expensive (mostly because of tremendous end of life care costs).
Edit: I dug around a bit and found the study I was thinking of. It was actually a study on obesity (also not done by the UK), but used (non-obese) smokers as a group for comparison.
Surely most living people are worth more than the economic cost of keeping them alive. They don't seem to even mention the economic value of a living person, other than to say that they didn't take into account the difference in productivity between obese and non-obese people.
Given that most smokers/obese people tend to die right around retirement age, we probably aren't leaving much on the table (from a purely economic perspective). Smokers probably aren't missing enough days of work to cancel out the $60k they save the system by smoking (not to mention all the extra taxes they pay).
But there's more value to human beings than their economic value, hence my talk about non-monetary costs. There's very real suffering that happens, and I'm not sure that's something you can put down in a spreadsheet somewhere.
Lots of tremendously valuable labor is done by people who don't pull down a wage. I.e., retired people who volunteer and watch the grand kids. Many people -- perhaps most -- contribute more value to society in retirement than in their wage labor years.
This has never made sense to me. I'd be interested to know if there are numbers to back it up. You still have your most expensive years (the ones that come before death), they just come much sooner and are much more likely to involve expensive debilitating disease. In any case, the expense of old age mostly comes from pills and surgery which are artificially expensive due to our shit healthcare system. And I doubt we accurately measure the economic benefit of having the elderly around to help with young families, provide wisdom and experience, etc.
The issue was prohibition in the USA was that it indiscriminately criminalised selling, transporting, owning and consuming alcohol. With tobacco, modern countries could simply ban selling while allowing consumption. The risk is that the black market would flourish. I think the current policy of constantly hiking the price is a compromise: it restricts availability while limiting the development of parallel sell channels.
That hasn’t worked well with cannabis. If the price is too high, that allows the black market to thrive. There are three dispensaries on my street. Yet there’s still street-level drug dealers selling illegal cannabis.
Being subjected to the carceral system is indeed bad for your health, but there's a gap here: you haven't explained why banning smoking means we have to put people in prison.
I would have thought to just fine them, or tax purchases out of existence. No need for shackles.
The enforcement of that fining system will put thousands of people in prison, since fining use necessarily means prohibiting sale (or, fining retail sale necessarily prohibits wholesale, etc). This is a thing people already go to prison for, simply because the licensing fees annoy people.
NYPD officers approached Garner on July 17 on suspicion of selling single cigarettes from packs without tax stamps. After Garner told the police that he was tired of being harassed and that he was not selling cigarettes, the officers attempted to arrest Garner. When Pantaleo placed his hands on Garner, Garner pulled his arms away. Pantaleo then placed his arm around Garner's neck and wrestled him to the ground. With multiple officers pinning him down, Garner repeated the words "I can't breathe" 11 times while lying face down on the sidewalk. After Garner lost consciousness, he remained lying on the sidewalk for seven minutes while the officers waited for an ambulance to arrive. Garner was pronounced dead at an area hospital approximately one hour later.
How do people pay fines? If they are unable to pay what are the penalties? You also just created a black market for people who still want to smoke and that'll produce all kinds of fun.
There's already a massive black market for people who want to smoke in the form of tax stamp fraud. It used to be even bigger than it currently is, but there are two forces working against it: the overall decline of organized crime starting in the 1980s, and the overall decline in the number of smokers.
Black markets are a reality under current economic conditions, and they're a reality even in completely legal markets (there's always someone willing to pay XX% less in exchange for YY% more legal risk). Putting extreme taxes and/or fines on smoking might pour gas on that market, but long-term trends just don't support its survival.
And as for fines: we already have a legal structure for that[1].
I think they can be, although I'd like to see specific numbers on that. Killing roughly half a million Americans a year is a high bar to clear in terms of harmful social policy changes.
But there's also a trend against long term damage here: smoking rates have been declining for decades, and the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that higher taxes and civil penalties (like fines for smoking in parks) do reduce smoking across all ages and demographics. Fewer people smoking overall means fewer people who are subject to any sort of systemic abuse. That feels like a decent tradeoff to me, especially when we consider the knock-on effects of smoking itself (individual and community health, pollution, dental outcomes, &c).
You can't tax purchases out of existence. That creates a black market. Indeed, countries that have raised taxes to astronomical levels have significant illegal markets for tobacco.
What happens when they don't pay their fines? There has to be some backup plan and it's usually jail. You could keep increasing the fine for as long as they don't pay, but they you end up with loads of bankrupt people.
> or tax purchases out of existence
That creates a black market. In the UK, where tobacco taxes are high, it's quite easy to find small shops and individuals who will sell illegally imported cigarettes at a fraction of the price.
Prohibition has clearly been worse in the case of alcohol and marijuana. You might be right, but I’m not convinced a prohibition on production and sale would produce the same black market for tobacco. Maybe it’s my own bias, but I like to think that most people that smoke don’t really want to. It’s driven by addiction and ease of access. Cravings are ephemeral and it’s not like buying a 6 pack or some pot to have a good time later. There’s a spectrum where prohibition works. The best example I can think of (at the extreme) is plastic bags at supermarkets in California - no black market for that, vs marijuana where it clearly a failure.
I think there can be a place in between allowing it and incarcerating people. Make it illegal to sell and may be heavy fines for getting caught smoking?
Sure, there will be a black market for it but a lot of the low effort entrants to the market and many new entrants will be discouraged. Overall there will be less people using it.
I generally understand that prohibiting something with the threat of incarceration is wrong, but without some legal interference smoking is not going to go away.
What about the current system, where it's not prohibited but people tell you it's bad all the time, where does it fall on the scale? Is it the best solution?
Not all tobacco products are equal because not all tobacco products are intended to be inhaled. Cigars and Pipe tobacco aren't intended to be inhaled and most people will not find them addictive.
But there's no nuance regarding them in discussion of tobacco. They do likely have negative issues in terms of potential mouth cancer, but they're way less dangerous than cigarettes.
I was responding to somebody who lumped all 'drugs' into a single category. Talk to them about a lack of nuance. FWIW, I'm all about safe, regulated supply and harm reduction -- nicotine products included.
Outright prohibition is massively expensive (prisons, police, loss of taxes), is a gift to criminals who will grow/import it illegally and sell it, and has outsized negative consequences on the people who use it anyways.
Partial prohibition (under X years of age), taxes, and public education work to reduce the amount of it, without most of the negative side effects, so we did those. If you could point at other measures that would further reduce the usage, which didn't come with huge drawbacks, I'm pretty sure we would jump on that as well. Unfortunately, it's not clear any such measures exist.