[anotheracctfo]

Cigarettes are directly marketed to kids and have been for decades. I still remember the DARE posters from high school THAT WERE MADE BY THE TOBACCO INDUSTRY, and were specifically designed to have the opposite effect.

I also remember that a solid quarter of the student population smoked. So good luck with your abstinence policies, they have such a strong track record.

Speaking of which, does abstinence only education result in less teen pregnancy, or more? I can't quite remember.

[AdamH12113]

Smoking prevention has been going well for decades. This graph[1] shows a consistent year-over-year decline in adult per capita cigarette consumption since about 1970, bringing it to around a quarter of its peak level in the 1960s. I had more trouble finding good graphs for teenagers, but it looks like teen smoking had a resurgence in the 1990s and has been in decline since then, with a sharp rise in vaping in recent years. (See Figure 2 here[2].)

Before e-cigarettes came along, it sure looked like the United States was well on its way to eliminating tobacco smoking altogether.

[1] https://kottke.org/14/07/the-rise-and-fall-of-american-smoki...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/su/su6901a7.htm

[choko]

Why eliminate smoking entirely? Some people want to smoke and that should be their business. The risks of smoking have been known for decades and some people accept those risks because they enjoy it. Instead of harassing them, how about we accept that personal freedom means that some people won't always make the choices you would like.

[AdamH12113]

Smoking, at anything like the scale it currently happens, is not in any way a deliberate, rational acceptance of risk vs. reward. Almost all smokers start smoking when they are teenagers (i.e. children), when their brains are not fully developed. Nicotine is highly addictive, which makes it very difficult to later make a rational decision to stop. And teenagers who do start smoking do not do so as individuals in a vacuum, they do so with other teenagers due to peer pressure and other social factors.

Marketing a highly-addictive carcinogen to children is not about "personal freedom".

[choko]

Your argument boils down to "think of the children" which I do not find compelling. I can rationalize taking all kinds of things away from people with that logic.

[sdorf]

You're setting up a straw man for yourself to knock down; the points they're making are more nuanced than just 'think of the children' and you're being excessively reductive when you frame it that way.

[choko]

Make another argument then. There are lots of ways to protect children without limiting the liberty of consenting adults.

[vxNsr]

Your “personal freedoms” end when they cause you to become a burden on the state. If you want to smoke I’m totally fine with that as long as you agree to be banned from using any public health services ever, no Medicaid no Medicare no social security. As you said, the dangers have been known for decades, so everyone involved can make a rational decision.

When your choices cause others problems they’re no longer just “yours” and you need to consider how you’re affecting the wider society.

[Clubber]

>Your “personal freedoms” end when they cause you to become a burden on the state.

Orwell, is that you?

>If you want to smoke I’m totally fine with that as long as you agree to be banned from using any public health services ever, no Medicaid no Medicare no social security.

This is something that people who harass and spit homeless people would say.

>As you said, the dangers have been known for decades, so everyone involved can make a rational decision.

You think drug addition is in any way rational? Wake up.

[samatman]

E-cigarettes can't get in the way of eliminating tobacco smoking, because they aren't tobacco and they aren't smoking.

It's the smoking that's deleterious to health. Nicotine is an addictive stimulant but if it's otherwise harmful it's very difficult to demonstrate this.

[mullingitover]

Governments only really started to care about vaping when teen smoking started to plummet. Those teens were going to become a valuable revenue stream!

Also, governments have a perverse incentive to maintain tobacco sales. There are 10x as many enforcement checks for tobacco taxes being paid as there are for underage tobacco purchases.

[Clubber]

The less people smoke cigarettes (vapes are not part of the deal), the less the states get from the Tobacco master settlement case in 1998. There is a significant financial incentive for governments to keep people smoking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...

[AlgorithmicTime]

Vaping is not smoking. This should be obvious, but you apparently are totally unaware that vaping is not smoking.

[AdamH12113]

Oh, give me a break. It's nicotine, it's inhaled, it's made by corporations who market it to children so they'll become addicted before their brains finish developing. Vaping might do less damage to the lungs, but aside from that the problematic parts are the same.

[nicoburns]

That depends where. Here in the UK, cigarettes cannot be marketed at all. To kids or adults. That seems like a sensible middle ground to me. Allow the product to be sold, but don't allow advertising that pushes people into buying it.

I feel like abstinence campaigns work somewhat better with cigarettes than sex/alcohol because cigarettes are legitimately bad for you, and many users of cigarettes genuinely regret taking up smoking (whereas barely anyone will tell you they regret drinking or having sex).

[choko]

Drinking significantly increases your risk of certain cancers. While smoking is more of a cancer risk, drinking inhibits judgement and can lead to all sort of issues in addition to cancer risk - drunk driving, violence, etc. In short, alcohol is legitimatly bad for you.

https://www.icr.ac.uk/blogs/science-talk/page-details/when-i...

[vkou]

Yes, it is. Alcohol shouldn't be allowed to be marketed either.

[joe_guy]

> Cigarettes are directly marketed to kids

Can you provide a recent example of cigarettes being marketed to kids in USA?

[FireBeyond]

Not in the US, but "Winners Don't Quit" is a tobacco company marketing campaign from 2019 on.