[tptacek]

I'm not being glib. This article is premised on the idea that because there are no health benefits to tobacco (none.), it has no value whatsoever. But it clearly does have value: it is a source of pleasure for a large number of people. Pleasure has value. People shouldn't smoke, it makes perfect sense to vice-tax it to offset the externalities, and nobody should valorize the companies profiting from those externalities. But the reason we "permit" it is because we have no business not permitting it: we have centuries of experience showing that, unlike opiates and methamphetamine, there is no risk of tobacco destabilizing society.

It's a comically weak argument. It could, as I just said, be applied just as readily to bacon.

[andybak]

> unlike opiates and methamphetamine

Here you're picked the extremes to make your point stronger. There's plenty of prohibited substances and behaviours that are much closer to the gray area that this article is pondering on.

I don't have a clear view on this topic myself - but there's too many people in this thread claiming that it's absurd to even have the discussion - which I think is lazy and disingenuous.

[tptacek]

Name a prohibited substance that (1) poses no threat of destabilizing society or the health care system, (2) has centuries of cultural context, and (3) isn't on the verge of being legalized right now, like cannabis and psilocybin.

The imminent legalization of psilocybin makes my argument for me. It was an argument isomorphic to the one this anti-smoking piece made that banned it in the first place. And as a society, we're charting a course in the opposite direction of that argument, because, it turns out, that argument was dumb.

[andybak]

See? We're now having the nuanced discussion that I was hoping for. ;-)

I probably agree with you. I just wasn't keen on your one-liners.

[tptacek]

I stand behind the one-liner that roots this subthread.

[kazinator]

The one-liner topic do not permit tobacco use. Not in the unconditional way that we permit bacon use. We permit tobacco use at the legislative level only in the sense that it's not criminalized.

Smoking is widely banned in workplaces and public spaces in many countries. I can bring a bacon lunch to work and nobody will even know. A five-year-old sent on a shopping errand can buy bacon.

Smoking is a nuisance and a harm to people around the smoker in ways that bacon isn't.

I've not read reports of bacon being addictive; that someone has to have more and more strips of bacon everyday, and has severe withdrawal symptoms when he or she tries to quit.

Therefore, no, it doesn't seem that we can take a "why do we still permit tobacoo" lament and transliterate it to bacon such that it makes sense.

Moreover, if we could do the substitution so that it makes sense, that wouldn't necessarily make the argumentation false. Presumably, the point of the substitution would be to try to discredit the argument due to it being self-evident that bacon is good and must continue to mass-produced and freely available.

[tptacek]

The production of bacon is a nuisance and harm to people in ways that tobacco farms are not, so I don't think you've exsanguinated my analogy as completely as you appear to think you have. :)