Hawaii considers ban on cigarette sales
abc30.com
abc30.com
[Disclaimer: I smoked tobacco in the past (~10 years ago for a few months in HS due to social reasons) but I wouldn't care the slightest if they're banned.]
I don't think cigs are more harmful than meth or heroin. If countries like Portugal had success legalizing these hardcore drugs and using other sorts of policies to limit their harmful effects, why go backwards and ban them? I'm all for limiting harms of cigs, especially to children who are more susceptible, but is this really the right approach to solve this problem?
Again this is a legitimate question; not being sarcastic.
The latter opens up a Pandora's box of regulatory capture, since problem users account for the vast majority of profits in recreational drug industries.
Meanwhile coming up with a defensible reason to criminalize possession in amounts for personal use is a bit of a stretch. You either care about drug users as people (in which case alienating them from law enforcement is bad) or you don't (in which case there is no reason to regulate drugs at all). There's a bit of a gray area around discouraging initiation of new users, I suppose, but mostly it comes down to punishing people for getting high in ways you don't approve of.
To my knowledge, a ban of only a single delivery system is unprecedented. I'd be interested if anyone has another example, to see how that turned out.
150+ years ago people were smoking tobacco from pipes. Cigarettes aren't required for a tobacco habit. In an alternate universe some one could be making the same point about single use auto heroin injectors.
They really help. Machine-made cigarettes dramatically increased the ease and popularity of smoking (beginning in the late 1800s).
> The widespread smoking of cigarettes in the Western world is largely a 20th-century phenomenon. At the start of the 20th century, the per capita annual consumption in the U.S. was 54 cigarettes (with less than 0.5% of the population smoking more than 100 cigarettes per year), and consumption there peaked at 4,259 per capita in 1965
My house and garden are in what were fields until the 1950s. I'm digging up huge amounts of pipe remains. I don't make any claims to the size of the industry from that, but it certainly wasn't niche.
FWIW, the second part of the sentence is a direct contradiction of the first part.
How about:
I don't want to make any claims about the upper bounds of smoking in the mid 19th century and earlier, but the lower bound is at least above what a layman would describe as 'niche'.
Or is that too wordy?
Theres also in the case of passive smoking, so smoking is demonstratively damaging to innocent people. Which leads to.
There's probably a question as to what the states responsibility is. If little Timmy goes out and buys (legal) heroin and dies, how culpable is state in that situation? What about if Timmy just gets addicted and goes around breaking into peoples houses?
It a part of the spectrum of control. When smoking is banned in bars and restaurants or heavily taxed like in Australia ($40 AUD!), prevalence of smoking declines.
There's a bunch of studies on scholar.google about the effects of anti-smoking regulation for the interested.
Because the long term decline predates many of the policies, I assume no causality violations.
> Where is proof for that assumption?
You're asking me to prove a negative.
Take a look at the charts here (https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-1-prevalence/1...), in the time periods covered they've banned smoking in nightclubs, shopping centers, parks, beaches, cafes, the cost of cigarettes has gone up astronomically (creating a huge black market BTW), the legal age went up, advertising was banned, plain packaging was introduced etc. During all those initiatives the decline remains pretty constant, if they were having an effect then I'd expect the decline to plateau before their introduction.
But yeah, people will get something if they really want it.
Also if smoking is generally prohibited somewhere, I can go there to speak with the person to stop smoking, and that's enough for me, I wouldn't care if people did it _inside_ their own home.
Now we're down to "habit" and "it's always been here", which isn't convincing enough for me.
It seems it should be one’s own choice to smoke in private.
PS: Does that strawman smoke menthols?
What's the definition "the government uses"? And why is it different from the one in the comment you're replying to?
> PS: Does that strawman smoke menthols?
?
So I suppose
A. Should govt ban any harmful activities? Yes some activities impose a wider cost on society, and are best dealt with at a societal level.
B. Should govt ban all harmful activities? Probably not no. Everything is harmful in some way, shape or form. So unless you ban everything.....
Perhaps, but as the guidelines state
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Fool me once, and all that, and at the end of the day I expect reasonable answers to my imperfect questions, its unfair not to offer the same to others.
Unless you make distinctions, I don't think this argument can continue.
What makes you think I was referring to anything else?
People are always going to murder, evade taxes, do illegal drugs. The fact that some people won't follow laws isn't a reason not to implement them.
I'm guessing that due to geography, Hawaii has the most chance in the US of making this work though.
Ban cigar sales and many people will get deliveries by domestic mail. That doesn't hold for cigarettes.
> Ban cigar sales and many people will get deliveries by domestic mail. That doesn't hold for cigarettes.
I bet you're right for people who currently seek out cigars (more or less). But I suspect there will be some substitution effect of cigars for cigarettes, if a bill like this is passed, and cigars can still be sold locally. I expect the effect would be smaller in magnitude if cigars could only be purchased from mainland sellers and shipped via USPS. But I am just speculating.
If so, then you're just debating implementation details which I think is less important and less interesting than the real discussion about what personal autonomy, and personal responsibility, you should have to live your life as you see fit.
I was intending it as an rhetorical question.
Agreed personal autonomy, and personal responsibility are the interesting questions, not really where the comment I was responding was leading though.
> If approved, the restrictions would only apply to cigarettes—not e-cigarettes, cigars or chewing tobacco.
Just cigarettes. Oddly, cigars are excepted. Probably just get a lot of oddly thin and long cigar sales.
Two years later, no one under 100 would be allowed to buy cigarettes. "
This is the most wacky way to ban it I can think of. This can possibly pass a challenge in court.
Why not? Sure, it's discriminatory, but it's not a suspect or quasi-suspect class, so the standard of review is rational basis, which is a very low standard, and which is satisfied essentially when there is any legitimate government interest being served and any rational relationship between the basis of discrimination and any such legitimate purpose, even an indirect one which could be more specifically targeted (more narrow targeting is required when intermediate or strict scrutiny is involved.)
Or are you imagining some other basis for legal challenge?
Here’s the deal - it’s not a rights thing. It’s the fact that smoking cigarettes, no matter what, is a group act. You bring everyone within eyesight of you into your bad habit. There are plenty of other ways to get your nicotine fix, and we can still tax the shit out of it.
Nice going, Hawaii. I hope it actually happens.
Btw, Hawaii is one of the boldest states to consider this. I have a condo on the water there and I have to ask people to not smoke cigarettes under my deck on a daily basis. I wouldnt be surprised if there were a huge backlash to this suggestion.