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Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: when has banning any drug worked in the past? I watched quite a few TED Talks claiming there is data suggesting legalizing all drugs -- even those that are "objectively harmful" like meth or heroin -- has merits.

[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.

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What's unique about this is that they don't seem to be considering banning other forms of nicotine. This means that (unlike most substance bans) this could have the effect of pushing smokers toward safer alternatives like transdermal patches and gum.

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.

What about the bans on alcohol inhalation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_inhalation

From this data point, it appears that it may work.

Ooh, good catch. I hadn't heard of those.

I'd also say that being on little islands probably matters to enforcement.

Maybe? It's tropical and moist, plants tend to grow well without too much care. They have a notorious problem with people planting "invasive species" (marijuana) in state parks. If they just banned tobacco, I expect people would just grow it.

The key takeaway here is herion and meth dont travel further than the person doing the dugs. Smoking anything brings everyone around you into it, and for those who dont smoke it really sucks.

But yeah, people will get something if they really want it.

Smoking is a popular intake method for both heroin and meth, FYI.

But even if heroin were legalised, I probably wouldn't see too many heroin smokers popping up at the bus stop, just because of cultural pressure.

I suppose one useful role is in denormalising smoking. Current smokers probably started when smoking was 'normal', criminalising may give people cause to stop and reevaluate. Other drugs havent been legal in living history so aren't seen I the same light?

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?

How culpable is the state when Timmy dies from legal alcohol?

>>banning any drug worked in the past?

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.

Is there any evidence of that? A lot of anti-smoking efforts seem to just take credit for the natural long term decline, at best the nudge it along 1 or 2 percent.

Smoking declined from 20% of the US population to 15% from 2005 to 2015 so the efforts are making an impact.

It's been declining for decades, that this trend continued isn't proof of any specific measures like bar/restaurant bans and price hikes.

Why do you assume the long-term decline is natural and not a consequence of the various policies? Where is proof for that assumption?

There's a bunch of studies on scholar.google about the effects of anti-smoking regulation for the interested.

> Why do you assume the long-term decline is natural and not a consequence of the various policies?

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.

I read the link: "Hill and colleagues have suggested that the pattern of decline in smoking prevalence correlates with the level of tobacco control activities occurring at the time.11,12 The drop in male smoking rates seen in the early 1980s coincided with a period of new, well-funded media-led Quit campaigns"

AFAIR Portugal did not legalize drugs, it decriminalised them.

Expanding on this a bit, there's a huge difference between not punishing drug users and allowing commercial sales.

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.

I don't care if a person uses a drug, as it doesn't affect my health. But tobacco smokers directly effect me. I'm a very slow CYP1A1 metabolizer, which means that my lungs are not able to detoxificate smoke / air pollution like most people, and it effects me probably much more than you.

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.

This is proposed by a single legislator; they may not have considered the implications especially deeply. The text in particular bans cigarettes, but not loose leaf tobacco. It's unclear if any black market for pre-rolled cigarettes is viable enough to be worth the costs of a black market business.

Drugs that require manufacturing infrastructure to be to a massive scale to meet demand are really easy to target. Cigarettes aren't really something you can make yourself to the quality that people expect from automated processes at the capacity they demand them.

Isn't that just a result of the current (legal) industry?

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.

> 150+ years ago people were smoking tobacco from pipes. Cigarettes aren't required for a tobacco habit.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette#History

Perhaps, it's hard to disentangle all that from increasing wealth, industrialisation and globalisation though.

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.

> 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.

Yes I could have worded it better :)

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?

Quite. :) The initial wording is alright, but I couldn't help but notice the ironic internal contradiction.

Early cigarette rollers were hand operated by a single person. It may not be practical from a labor perspective vs just smuggling in legal cigs from out of state, but it's easily something that could be done in small scale.

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