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Comment by kodablah | Hacker News Reader

This is scarily prohibitionist. This is not a health-related choice, only an enjoyment preference one. Whether you find the war on smoking justified or not, outright banning of flavored tobacco this way has parallels in other illegalization approaches. And when you grow your own tobacco and flavor it? Criminal.

On a general note, I find it upsetting how many people cheer these things on due to misplaced righteousness. You can disagree with smoking and even recognize its societal harms that affect you without supporting making it illegal. If only the human lifecycle were twice as long, we'd have many remembering political victories built on prohibition platforms followed by state after state banning breweries on the way to the 18th amendment.

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It's absolutely health-related. Menthol is a mild anaesthetic (remember menthol sports cream?) and permits the inexperienced smoker to inhale fully. Same with the eugenol in kretek cigarettes.

Same with sugar in alcoholic beverages. Or salt on red meat.

Same with sugar in cigarettes, even. Sugar is a major ingredient, and makes them easier to inhale compared to cigars, which partly accounts for their global popularity.

Both just work so well together. :)

Also, salt in meat and vege stews ~ if you have nothing else in terms of flavour, salt makes it infinitely more appetizing.

Sugar provides calories and salt is a preservative. Your analogy doesn’t make sense. Menthol has no value other than taste.

The taste is the value. Mechanically it makes cigarettes easier to inhale.

Obviously sugar provides some calories, but no one is getting fat from the sugar in cigarettes. The caloric value is negligible.

What?

You absolutely wouldn't make the case that sugar is being added to foods in order to add additional calories, or that salt is being added to foods in order to preserve them. The fact that you can come up with a spurious purpose for an additive doesn't make pointing out the additive's primary purpose nonsensical.

The purpose of adding to an alcoholic beverage isn’t to increase caloric content, it is solely to make it more palatable. Restaurants don’t salt their steaks to preserve them, they do it to improve the flavor.

You jest, but here in the UK, where menthols were banned several years ago, we tax sugar in beverages (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-43659124), and food producers are under pressure to cut salt and sugar from their products (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/salt-reduction-ta...).

I understand the rationale behind this prohibitionist, paternalistic approach (maintain a healthy work/consumption force, reduce burden on socialised healthcare, improve GDP), but the additional cost to the economy is already built in to these goods - smoke tax (it’s not just tobacco, it’s anything you could burn and inhale) in the uk more than covers the cost of smoking related illness.

The sugar tax has already resulted in many different beverage companies to reduce the amount of sugar in their drinks in the UK. Personally I think stopping government corn subsidies (that are used to make a dirt cheap sugar substitute in the form of high fructose corn syrup) would be a much better way of doing it, but obesity is such a severe issue that we need to do something about it.

It’s actually really annoying. I hardly ever drink sugary drinks, but sometimes on a long drive I’d get one specifically for the sugar content (sans caffeine and taurine). Now diet versions of everything seem to be default.

Also, whilst I understand many/most people can't taste the difference, the swap to using sweeteners has had the same level of disgust to my taste as stirring in a teaspoon of salt into almost every soft drink.

I'd actually prefer salt in my soft drink, making it a little isotonic!

I literally only have Coca-Cola for an occasional treat these days - My Beloved Irn-Bru, 7up & San Pellegrino have all been adulterated with awful-tasting artificial sweeteners and are simply unenjoyable for me now.

It's a weird future I find myself in, where I will never drink any of these things again, punished because of some third party entity's paternalism where other third parties are concerned (I'm not personally fat nor enjoy a diet that would ever make me so).

Menthols are still available in the UK today, I believe they are slated for removal from the market in 2020. What has been removed from the UK market is "10 decks", we can only buy 20s now.

If all you want out of life is to work and consume, I guess that’s fine. I want more than that.

> smoke tax (it’s not just tobacco, it’s anything you could burn and inhale) in the uk more than covers the cost of smoking related illness.

...according to the people who sell cigarettes.

...according to the people who sell cigarettes

Smoking related illnesses in the UK cost the NHS (taxpayers) around £5Bn year, and taxes on tobacco raise around £9Bn. So it's pretty close, but that £4Bn gap will need to be made up from somewhere. Personally I'd legalise the wacky tobaccy and tax that, but there really ought to be equivalent taxes on vaping too.

Also if life expectancy goes up, there will be an even greater shortfall in pensions too.

So, the numbers you're talking about are conservative esitmates.

They only include smokers. They don't include, for example, the children of smokers, who have many much more respiratory illness than other children.

The hospital admission costs only include this list, and only include them when these are the primary diagnosis of the admission episode.

Importantly, the cost used is the payment by results cost, not the actual cost to the treating trusts or GP surgeries.

> Smoking attributable admissions are defined as spells where the primary diagnosis of the admission episode is attributable to the following ICD-10 codes:

> malignant neoplasms: lip, oral cavity, pharynx (C00 to C14), oesophagus (C15), stomach (C16), pancreas (C25), larynx (C32), trachea, lung, bronchus (C33-C34), cervix uteri (C53), kidney and renal pelvis (C64 to C66, C68), urinary bladder (C67), acute myeloid leukaemia (C92), unspecified site (C80)

> cardiovascular diseases: ischaemic heart disease (I20 to I25), other heart disease (I00 to I09, I26 to I51), cerebrovascular disease (I60 to I69), atherosclerosis (I70), aortic aneurysm (I71), other arterial disease (I72 to I78)

> respiratory diseases: pneumonia, influenza (J10 to J18), bronchitis, emphysema (J40 to J43), chronic airway obstruction (J44)

> diseases of the digestive system: stomach ulcer, duodenal ulcer (K25 to K27), Crohn’s disease (K50), periodontal disease (K05)

> other diseases: age related cataract (H25), hip fracture (S72.0 to S72.2), spontaneous abortion (O03)

The direct cost to the NHS is £2.7Bn, £5Bn is an estimate of the total cost from The Nursing Times.

> but there really ought to be equivalent taxes on vaping too.

No need to demonstrate health risks first?

Some taxes are on “sins” and some are on “luxuries”. But the money’s still got to come from somewhere. Who wins if we ban smoking and cut that money from the NHS? No one.

Pretty sure that 4bn gap is more than compensated by the fact that smokers die earlier.

I have also had a health professional who was scathing about the lo-salt campaign "very well marketed".

The only problem is what they replace sale, sugar fat with can be worse.

This is completely true. I started smoking at 17 with menthols because they tasted good to me and were easier to inhale. Switched to regular after I got used to them.

I would also ban the mixing of substances that have a bronchodilator effect with the excuse of improving taste.

Yup, ammonia will totally improve the taste.

Have you ever smoked a cigarette in your life? You don't know what you're talking about.

When my father quit for periods of time, he would always start up again on menthols because the volume he smoked hurt too much with his Marlboro reds, and he said the menthols made it easier.

Yes, it is that addictive that he would knowingly switch to menthols to help him ramp back up again.

To be frank, his anecdote conflicts with my own. It is pure speculation that inhaling menthol actually creates an analgesic effect which works towards the sensation of smoke in the lungs. I find mentholated cigarettes harsher, because menthol has a certain heat to it not unlike peppermint.

While the heath related differences exist, they exist in several different forms of tobacco consumption. The proposed ban is coming at the same time as the proposal for banning all flavored-except-menthol ecigs. By your logic, menthol flavored ecigs would also encourage more inhalation which is also worse and should be banned with the other flavors, but it's not. Why? Because it's, admittedly, more about the type of consumer and it's a government-mandated step down program. It's more about what's politically acceptable to ban than health related. While it may have benefits (prohibition cut drinking in half), if anything, it's a trial balloon.

I believe the general war on tobacco to be rooted in health concerns, but I believe this action to be a test to confirm the societal acceptance of this approach.

You don't need anything to numb your lungs to inhale deeply from a vape. And I think that Juul & similar should be banned because of the addiction potential, the way they deliver nicotine is designed to resemble cigarettes.

But there isn't much health danger from being just addicted to nicotine. It's probably comparable to caffeine.

What makes cigarettes so lethal is all the other toxins.

Aside from the risks of smoking (tar etc. like you said) nicotine has some health benefits. To the extent that it is used as a supplement by some.

https://examine.com/supplements/nicotine/

It's also being looked at as a new ADHD drug, but its addictiveness makes it difficult.

Yeah, because the amphetamines we currently use to treat ADHD aren’t addictive at all.

Being looked at by whom?

Nicotine and caffeine are very different biologically. Caffeine addiction is not nearly as powerful. There are upper bounds to the biological effect of caffeine.

Addiction in itself is not harmful at all. It just means you have to keep using the substance, not that it's harmful in itself, as long as you take it.

Nicotine suppresses elastin synthesis. Actively harms alveoli in lungs, and skin condition.

As a regular user of nicotine lozenges, I’m struggling to work out how my lung alveoli are going to be affected.

Elastin is an important protein in tissues that need to be elastic to function well, such as alveoli. For example, the breakdown of elastin is a major mechanism for the breathing difficulties suffered by people with emphysema.

Which isn't to say that lozenges are likely to cause it - it's still primarily caused by inhaling irritants - just using it to illustrate how something that interferes with elastin production might affect your breathing, even if you aren't inhaling it.

In short: Your alveoli all have blood supplies.

It's the same mechanism that smoking damages your skin. Nicotine in your blood gets everywhere. It affects elastin production throughout your body.

Smoking is a multi-stage attack on alveoli. You're both physically damaging them with the smoke and inhibiting their ability to regenerate. But they're a high-use tissue. Even without the additional damage, you're harming their ability to regrow.

Nicotine use alters cholesterol. It raises your LDL and constricts your blood vessels.

Why should it be banned? Just because something is addictive doesn't mean it's bad outright. Caffeine is addictive. Should we ban that too? Nicotine itself isn't much more harmful than caffeine.

The UK is (probably) banning caffeine for under 18s, so it appears that governments think “yes”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45342682

For a second I thought you were saying the UK was going full mormon for kids but then I clicked the articles and realized it was just energy drinks specifically (which imo isn't a terrible idea).

I was gonna say, tho, if they were gonna ban ALL caffeine for kids under 18, oh boy Coca Cola would have a shit fit I'm sure.

> And when you grow your own tobacco and flavor it? Criminal.

Source? The FDA only regulates product marketing, not drug legality.

Sorry if I was unclear, the part you quoted was meant as a future example based on slippery slope, the direction being taken, and similar substance outlawings. I am not saying this particular ban is criminalizing it.

> was meant as a future example based on slippery slope, the direction being taken, and similar substance outlawings.

The next logical step would be to ban cigarettes, but allow people to continue to purchase loose leaf tobacco. But if that happened then smoking rates would likely fall enough that it'd no longer be a major health issue, so even if we are in a slippery slope situation it doesn't seem likely to me that criminalization is the logical conclusion.

Already most smoking deaths are in long term smokers. The 14% of Americans who still smoke are for the most part only smoking a few cigarettes per day (except the couple percent in the severely mentally ill population), so they're going to have nowhere near the same level of health outcomes as the folks who spent decades smoking multiple packs per day. I wouldn't personally ever use tobacco products because I place a high value on not being dead, but from a statistical perspective just looking at the number of current deaths would lead one to vastly overestimate the risks of tobacco use practices. I guess my point is that from a personal level you should definitely not smoke, but at a public policy level we'd hit the point of diminishing returns far before instating a complete ban.

>at a public policy level we'd hit the point of diminishing returns far before instating a complete ban.

I think there was a study that showed chain smokers are actually less of a burden on the public because they die relatively quickly, reducing their consumption of medical resources.

I think I read on HN, including a source, that the concept of early smoker death was propaganda from the tobacco industry. I will look it up.

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

or search "smoking early death czech" for much more coverage of the Philip Morris study.

Interesting. I see a lot of criticism for the message of the article (saving money on people dying early), but not any for the methodology.

>smoking a few cigarettes per day (except the couple percent in the severely mentally ill population)

Smokers are mentally ill? Really? I’d say that people who see smokers as mentally ill are neurotic and have an authority complex, and probably have far greater issues than smokers.

You're jumping the gun here. A number of mental illnesses are highly correlated with heavy smoking. It's a legal coping mechanism that people can easily obtain entirely on their own.

> This is scarily prohibitionist.

The US Federal Government is prohibitionist when it comes to cocaine, marijuana and nuclear weapons. But when you start proposing bans on products that earn billions for multinational conglomerates, out come the little guys pointing at their Constitution.

Lots of us 'little guys' have been pointing at the Constitution re: the drug war since it first began.

You can be against both.

So are nukes free or a local artisanal craft? Because I'm pretty sure that they make billions for multinational conglomerates.

By the way, this already happened locally in San Francisco this year:

https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...

Why a broad prohibition on flavoured tobacco products instead of mentholated cigarettes and clove cigarettes? As far as the cancer potential and addiction goes, dip and chew are a different league from menthol cigarettes and vapes, especially Juul, with a psychopharmacology comparable to cigarettes.

flavoured ecigs target highschoolers

Utter rubbish. Are flavoured boxes of chocolates and flavoured coffee syrups targeting highschoolers too just because they're flavoured?

Every vaper and ex-vaper I know or have ever met has used flavoured ecigs, including myself while I was quitting. A whiff of the vapour as they pass is enough to establish if they're using a fruity flavour etc. As I'm in my mid 50s and my friends are mostly 30s-60s I think it's safe to say we're not highschoolers.

The one and only time I tried a tobacco flavoured ecig I almost vomited it was so terrible. I think it's a flavour everyone tries as they switch. Tries just the once mostly - they are utterly unlike any cigarette.

Before calling it utter rubbish, maybe you should do some research[1].

1: https://www.europeanneuropsychopharmacology.com/article/S092...

That article makes no reference to age groups, and suggests that a sweet taste increases desirability across the board. It seems like a stretch to then say they are targeting a particular age group, especially when the participants in the study were well outside of the alleged age group:

> We enrolled 16 occasional/intermittent to light smokers (4 female; M = 27 years, range 19–45;

The paper _does_ link to a more to a more targeted study[1], but there is a fairly major limitation ("does not allow direct estimation of flavoring’s role in initiation of tobacco use among youth") and it does not necessarily suggest that flavouring is targeting the young per se and not merely being what users in general are looking for.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2464690

That study makes no mention of age groups.

People who vape know that flavors make it more attractive, and it's orders of magnitude better than smoking

(Warning: anecdata incoming)

I know a number of people who have used flavored vapes for nicotine replacement therapy and haven’t had a cigarette in years. But I’ve also met some young people who’ve never smoked who started vaping because it’s “cool” and are now quite addicted to nicotine.

Juuls in particular are quite accessible for a non smoker (no getting through the body’s natural reaction to inhaling an irritant combined with being very discreet).

I guess I’m saying “why can’t it be both?”

Kids smoked cigarettes because it was cool. Now they sometimes vape. I suspect all the cool is from the vaping not because there's a strawberry flavour. When I was in school smoking was cool, but menthol cigs were for wimps. There was often a corner shop near schools that would sell one cig with two matches. Now that was targeting youngsters. I'm sure flavours do make vaping more palatable for everyone, but that's a very long way from those flavours existing to target youngsters.

Bizarre things like aerosol and glue sniffing had their phase of being a niche cool thing amongst kids. Seems like the few who must will always find something regardless of flavour or ease.

I still occasionally see school kids smoking regular cigarettes. How the hell they afford to beats me at over £10 for a 20 pack. But whether vaping or cigarettes there's far fewer kids bothering at all than say 20 or 40 years ago when it seemed like almost every school kid smoked. Besides I'd far rather a few kids were using a vape pen than those same kids on tobacco with all the additives and vastly worse health outcomes. Vapes are far easier to quit too as tobacco seems to have other more addictive components. Well, that was my feeling from having quit both.

I keep hearing of Juul as being something extra, more accessible, worse, more addictive, you name it! How are they different to the dozens of other brands of vapes and ecigs? I've yet to see one in the UK, if they're even sold here.

They definitely inadvertently do, because they target marginal users. The weird thing is that ecigs are targeted by prohibitionists at all, because they completely lack everything that is notably bad for your health about cigarettes, and every smoker who switches to them significantly improves their outcomes.

I don't think that people who needed their nicotine with candy flavor to tolerate it are switching to smoking in the numbers that smokers are moving in the other direction.

Are you in favor of banning selling poison to children on store shelves? Because that's exactly what this is. If cigarettes were invented today they'd never make it to market.

Each cigarette has 2000 toxins. Over 85% of smokers start at under 18. It's a life long addiction picked up by children that kills so companies can turn a profit. Not to mention the health care burden on society.

In no way or form should such a deadly substance be sold for consumption.

HN, a website purportedly about tech entrepreneurship generally favors the 'government knows best' model.

Whether it is a health related choice or not is immaterial. 30 minutes of cardio per day is generally regarded as a healthy choice. Yet for obvious reasons we are not taking a collective vote on making mild exercise compulsory for all individuals.

HN, a website purportedly about tech entrepreneurship generally favors the 'government knows best' model.

We use terms like hindsight bias and selection bias all the time here; is there a name for the perception that the 'other side' of a wide ideological divide is more prevalent? Because I've read the same complaints about the libertarian attitudes here.

There are plenty of folks on both sides of the fence (or it'd be boring).

Perhaps I observe this bias based upon the articles I have chosen to comment on. Or maybe it is an accurate assessment. I can only speak from my own experience.

However, I would expect that entrepreneurs would generally have a free market bias. I create online businesses because I have an affinity for tech, and because the Internet has largely been an unregulated space.

I think that viewing any argument that some government regulation can lead to the greater betterment of society as being a "government knows best" view is very close to being a strawman.

I definitely see quite a few folks from both sides of the libertarian/authoritarian spectrum. I originally wrote a much longer comment talking about how free markets need at least government regulation in order to function (so people have faith in them) while too much regulation leads to high barrier of entry, but I'm sure you get the gist.

I think there is still room to say: "if the government knows what is best for me to consume, then why not test that logic by taking it to its logical conclusion"

If we can't have that discussion without acrimonious downvotes and complaints to the moderator, then what are we doing here? I am inclined to go back to my original point about bias.

I think what you describe is angling towards the hostile media effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect

> You can disagree with smoking and even recognize its societal harms that affect you without supporting making it illegal.

Disagree. Smoking products have addictive attributes that suck the user in and make it extremely difficult to quit. I support the banning of smoking in a similar fashion as tightly controlling the supply of opioids.

> I support the banning of smoking in a similar fashion as tightly controlling the supply of opioids.

Are you saying that you want to model tobacco policy on the most unsuccessful public health policy of all time?

I’m saying that they are equivalent bad policy, and support tight controls on both. If you research, you’ll see the opioid crisis was kicked off by doctors freely prescribing like it was candy.

I see - it seems like you're saying something more nuanced than I initially thought. It seemed like you wanted to treat nicotine similarly to opioids, despite the abysmal, historic failure of opioid prohibition and all the death, disease, misery, and international crime that has directly been caused by it.

> If you research, you’ll see the opioid crisis was kicked off by doctors freely prescribing like it was candy.

I don't agree, nor do most serious drug policy researchers. Horrible problems with opioids have been waxing and waning for about 100 years in the United States, but were largely unknown prior to the Harrison Narcotics Act.

Your point is very sound that distributing highly concentrated forms of a drug in the midst of prohibition of more benign forms of that drug is likely to cause bad health outcomes. This is exactly what happened during alcohol prohibition, when consumption of beer dropped to nearly zero while consumption of whiskey soared.

Prohibition has been a abject failure whether it’s alcohol or opioids.

Discouraging use and offering treatment is far more effective.

While not AS addictive (to some) as nicotine, you really could argue the same for alcohol, couldn't you? In the US in 2018, what do you think is more directly and indirectly responsible for more societal harm: tobacco or alcohol?

Alcohol probably, but this would be mostly due to violence. Smoking has an area-of-effect that is purely based on how close you are to people smoking.

Smoking in the center of cities on the street should be illegal (like it is in most of Australia), because it causes harm to complete strangers.

> Smoking in the center of cities on the street should be illegal (like it is in most of Australia), because it causes harm to complete strangers.

I understand that secondhand smoke indoors is dangerous to others, but is there any real data on outdoor secondhand smoke?

How does it compare to the liters of exhaust per minute from diesel engines in trucks passing by on those same streets?

Perhaps more generally, at what ppm does second hand smoke start to have long term effects on unwitting participants, particularly compared to other major sources of toxins and their concentrations in an urban environment?

[edit: to be clear I’m genuinely curious, not trying to dismiss it or whatabout it. I’ve always thought most second hand smoke issues could be solved with good ventilation (aimed at properly exhausting the smoke) and it seems to me that trace amounts from smokers you pass by on the street are a completely different situation from sitting next to someone smoking indoors]

To clarify, there are two laws about this.

There is a specific law (I'm not sure if it's just in NSW or if it's nation-wide) about not being allowed to smoke within 4 meters of an exit to a building (because smokers tended to smoke right outside a building -- presumably because it's more convenient -- when indoor smoking became illegal). A large cluster of people smoking in front of a doorway is not much better than those same people just smoking in the lobby (and people who need to enter the building can't really avoid it).

There are other laws about smoke-free areas (my university campus is one of them). As a non-smoker I do appreciate this quite a bit (having lived in a country where smoking in public areas and indoors was very common), but I'm not sure about whether it is actually a significant improvement for non-smokers. The city's image is probably just as significant a motivator for such rules.

Regarding data, I did a quick Google search and found some articles[1,2,3] ranging in dates to 2007. I've only skimmed them, but one of them[1] specifically mentions doing comparison to pollution from cars.

[1]: http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/early/2016/05/26/13993003... [2]: https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/may9/smoking-050907.html [3]: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091118154619.h...

It's a neurotic fear of pollution and poisoning that is constantly reinforced instead of dismissed. Once you've convinced people that smoking is the most dangerous thing in the world, and they know that people smoke in order to get nicotine, it follows that any inadvertent inhalation of cigarette smoke is extremely dangerous, and that nicotine is the most deadly poison.

The data on close-quarters constant second-hand smoke (working in bars, having a partner that smokes) is sketchy, the idea that passing someone while walking outside and momentarily catching a whiff of smoke a couple of dozen times a day is a public health crisis that requires immediate worldwide prohibition is absurd, but common.

It's also a convenient piece of do-nothing legislation for local politicians to campaign on.

> it follows that any inadvertent inhalation of cigarette smoke is extremely dangerous, and that nicotine is the most deadly poison.

Nicotine isn't what most people are worried about, and presenting it this way is simply disingenuous. Tobacco smoke contains many other components than nicotine such as cyanide, benzene, arsenic, as well as 50 other known carcinogens. Literally nobody cares about your nicotine addiction, it's all of the other toxic components that are the problem.

The studies on second-hand smoking are very solid, and your calling them sketchy is very close to being an outright lie. Here is a summary of the many studies (dating back to the 80s) that all show the various impacts of second-hand smoking[1] -- it cites 194 papers. The WHO, CDC, American Cancer Society, American Lung Association, and many other groups (from other countries too) all concur that second-hand smoke is a very significant threat to the public's health.

Second-hand smoke is very likely one of the causes of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) for fucks' sake.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK44330/

> The data on close-quarters constant second-hand smoke (working in bars, having a partner that smokes) is sketchy

Okay, but the data on smoking is not sketchy at all, so it’s not a stretch to suggest that constant exposure to second hand smoke in a poorly ventilated environment is comparable to smoking. Unfortunately there’s no way to set up a classical controlled experiment to test that hypothesis ethically, so we have to make do with other experimental setups and data analysis.

We do have studies that assess the affects of air pollution in cities, so surely we can come up with some way of extrapolating, no?

> It's also a convenient piece of do-nothing legislation for local politicians to campaign on

Sure - cigarette smoke does not smell good to non-smokers so it’s an easy win these days since most people don’t smoke.

I’m just trying to come up with a way of legislating these things based on our best abilities to make conclusions based on data rather than feelings, but I feel as though the onslaught of information brought about by the internet is making it harder to disseminate the wheat while more disseminate the chaff. Not to mention all the ways one can make feelings look like data.

There is a lot of evidence that second-hand smoking is harmful. [1] is a summary on this topic from 2006 and cites 194 papers.

To describe the science on second-hand smoking to be anything other than solid is to simply lie about our knowledge on the health effects of smoking. To add to this, there is also significant evidence that SIDS is strongly correlated with parents who are smokers (and thus appears to be likely caused by smoking while pregnant, and second-hand smoke during infancy).

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK44330/

The building I work in downtown always has half a dozen smokers on the sidewalk. Wish they would reserve a balcony or something for them because as an ex smoker smelling it is especially painful to me.

We'll have to disagree. My concern is more about the direction (banning more and more at the federal level) and the righteousness that drives it. Given such justification, there are many vices, addictive ones at that, we can feel good about banning. It's not that precedent doesn't exist, it's more about whether it's the role of the government at the national level to make this type of decision.

I was just reading about Wayne Wheeler [0]. He had a negative personal anecdotal experience with alcohol which he successfully used to justify its banning. (edit: sorry, last part was meant to address the anecdote you previously had there, and which many of us have experienced with the harms of smoking by loved ones)

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Wheeler

I agree and disagree. While I find it really cool this is also what is getting kids

Wait are you saying that smoking is really cool?

Flavored tobacco or flavored weed. Etc. If you're a smoker it's just better than the plain stuff. It's like the pleasure of smoking shisha

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