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Going to get down voted to hell and back for this I expect, but hey, different opinions generate discussion right?
This is good legislation for the environment, for non-smokers, for the NHS, and has zero negative impact on smokers. The ONLY parties I see really hurt by this are tobacco companies, since retailers make minimal margins on tobacco.
The constant use of the word freedom in the thread comments just seems odd to me. This isn't a question of freedom, and the comments mostly seem to ignore the paradox of tolerance as it applies to antisocial activity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance. Individual freedoms have limits and must end at the boundary of another persons personal space and freedoms. That's why smoking is banned in confined public places.
Its all very well to say tax the shit out of it and fund the NHS, but that will feel pretty shit when your parent/partner/child has to wait for an operation because the queue is full of smokers who are entitled to that spot by having paid for it. Which also veers dangerously close to creating paid tracks within the public national health service.
I think there's a (probably) small subset of under-18s who are already addicted to nicotine who now have a lifelong issue of obtaining it legally, which I don't see addressed in the article. Imagine being 45 and needing a fake ID saying you're 47 so you can buy ciggies.
Most shops in the UK selling booze already operate a policy of asking for ID from anyone who they think looks under 25, even though the legislation is 18.
Likely as not they'll roll that policy on to cigarettes (in the few rare places that don't already) and that would mean the subset you're speaking about would have to be firmly addicted by the age of 11. At that point, I think this is not so much a tobacco problem, as a child welfare and protection issue and we have social care and protections that should already be addressing those cases.
I don't see anyone in that frame getting to middle age and ID for ciggies ranking in the top 10 of problems in their life.
I mean challenge 25 doesn't mean you have to be 25 to get served, it means if the cashier thinks you might be under 25 then they challenge you to produce ID. If anything this just means the challenge will become more and more ridiculous, in 10 years you'll be asking cashiers to make a decision on whether someone is over 35 or not, and so on.
I'm not convinced challenge 25 will be applied to this.
And I agree, middle aged people have bigger problems. So why would we add this to those?
I'm not convinced this is adding a problem to anyone but its an opinion, we can differ.
By that same logic most food should be illegal
There already is a lot of illegal food.
Illegal for food manufacturers inject your food with rat poison, illegal for them to pump your meat full of chlorine, illegal for them to sprinkle powdered arsenic all over your snacks for flavor, illegal to put snake venom in your food, illegal for them to put heroin in your food, they can't put just a bit of ketamine on you lunch, they can't put coke or meth in your soda.
How is this different?
You can eat rat poison all you like, it's not illegal to sell. It's simply illegal to offer it as an ingredient in your cookies.
Holy cherry picking batman.
By that logic, cigarettes should be illegal, but raw tabacco leaves should be legal, but not legal to sell to others to consume or included in any other products to put in your body.
Cigarettes have a single purpose, they aren't an additive in a product they have no business being in.
You aren't legally allowed to sell rat poison to specifically have people put inside their own body. Cigarettes are specifically sold for you to put into your own body.
Just say that you like cigarettes (or work for a tabacco company) and don't want them taken away. Which this type of legislation also wouldn't do. Otherwise, by your logic, let's make every substance in earth legal to package for human consumption by itself. I'm sure when they advertise meth and cyanide cigarettes to kids like they did tobacco for many years, nothing bad will happen.
I neither smoke (tobacco) or work for a tobacco company, and legalizing drugs (objectively a good thing) doesn't imply selling to kids. Just say you have an irrational hated of someone else doing something that doesn't affect you.
No, I think governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens against massive corporations using any and all psychological weapons they have at their disposal to harm people.
Again, this proposal is not criminalizing possession or consumption, it is limiting selling. I am all for decriminalizing drugs, but that does not mean that mega corporations that sink literal hundreds of billions into manipulating people and exploiting them should have free reign.
And tobacco affects the most people in the world besides alcohol lol. I know multiple people that have died directly from cigarettes and my mother in law will also likely die directly due to it. That is pretty much the most unlikely assumption to make.
That also isn't even getting into the damage to my own lungs caused by second hand smoke from people around me smoking and infecting an area without my consent. If someone goes around with a knife and starts cutting people up non-lethally, it doesn't make it OK because they are also cutting themselves.
Not only that. It's not legally easy to offer food containing e.g. insects or sawdust.
I read about a company that were selling cookies with sawdust in them as diet products. They put "Contains sawdust to reduce calories" right on the front of the packaging and were advertising it, so a customer would not be misled at all. But it was illegal for them to sell it.
You might need to explain that one a bit for me.
We have a lot of food regulation, sometimes to enforce quality (e.g. no chlorinated chicken), in other cases to encourage better public health (e.g. higher rates of tax on high sugar drinks).
What do you think my statements would make illegal?
Sugar, for one. You aren't talking about a vice tax, you are talking about outlawing it entirely.
Sorry, you're still not making any kind of sense. In no way does sugar compare with a product which, in use, actively damages the used and spreads toxic chemicals into the air for all around them. Nothing in my comment would make any stance against sugar remaining legal.