[gpm]

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.

[mjklin]

“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.”

- Jeremy Bentham, English (1748-1832)

[js8]

There might be a way to actually ban it without causing harmful effects: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59589775

[gpm]

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.

[Maursault]

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdV_1u-TodY&t=13m25s

[actually_a_dog]

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.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47129503