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Comment by indymike | Hacker News Reader

Tobacco control has been a big fail, all that has really happened is that government and tobacco became co-dependent. People are still dying from tobacco related disease (I've lost close family members to this), and the product is sold everywhere. I would hope we do not model anything on "tobacco control".

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>Tobacco control has been a big fail

Can you elaborate on this? Short of treating tobacco like heroin, what other measures should the government have taken to curb tobacco use?

"what other measures should the government have taken to curb tobacco use? "

Make people with traces of nicotine in their blood ineligible for free health care. Including emergency care.

Focus their minds.

Idk, the younger generation see it as filthy and don't go near it for the most part. Seems to have finally paid off.

The younger generation is rapidly cozying up to smoking marijuana.

Do you have some data for that? And I wonder if and how this affects the big problem we have with alcohol abuse at any age.

Finding data for this is a walk in the park (ha ha).

While I don't think we would disagree that cigarettes are still sold and there are still smokers, the problem is a fraction of what it was. That's not fail at all.

Its taken us 400+ years to get to this point. The science was in on smoking in 1948. It has taken over 70 years to get what progress we have had. That's a lot of lives cut short and a lot of suffering.

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