Do we as a society even need [alcohol|nicotine|cannabis|refined sugar|fat|salt]?
Maybe not. But I refuse to believe that you asked that question in good faith, because we're obviously going to have all of them. People should be free to live as healthily or as unhealthily as they choose.
People should be free to live as unhealthily as they choose as long as the problems they inevitably create don’t negatively affect other people.
Activities high in negative externalities should be prohibitively expensive to help pay for remediation, and the opposite should be positively reinforced, even subsidized. A stitch, in time, saves nine.
> But I refuse to believe that you asked that question in good faith, because we're obviously going to have all of them. People should be free to live as healthily or as unhealthily as they choose.
Why? Especially in a country with government-subsidized healthcare?
We don't need a lot of things. A better example than plastic straws is beef: we definitely don't need beef, it's already expensive, and it has an extremely large and disproportionately heavy impact on CO2 consumption due to the combination of required grain, methane release, and needing land for cows incentivizing cutting down rainforest. Most people here would be pretty up in arms about any proposal to ban beef, so why focus on comparatively harmless stuff like lipstick and soda?
Maybe not. But I refuse to believe that you asked that question in good faith, because we're obviously going to have all of them. People should be free to live as healthily or as unhealthily as they choose.