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Comment by bootwoot | Hacker News Reader

I don't think anyone is arguing for prohibition. We've seen that fail with every substance we've tried it with.

Public health/education campaigns, however, can be wildly effective with enough funding. Smoking cessation in particular has been massively successful even with no change to legality and billions of dollars of tobacco industry money doing everything they can to reverse it. The public health campaign in the US managed to turn cigarettes from chic to trashy and have made prohibition unnecessary. I could imagine the same happening with alcohol (and other problematic substances) on a long enough timeline.

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I agree they aren't arguing for prohibition at all. I don't fully believe what you said about health campaigns because, for example, obesity is also really bad for people and none of the existing campaigns against it had much of an impact, as far as I know. Furthermore, if one of the key concepts was to turn cigarettes from chic to trashy, then that seems really unlikely to work with either alcohol or obesity. How do you even really know why that one particular massive campaign was successful?

I have no evidence, just observation. With regard to obesity, it's a relatively newer problem compared to smoking and I haven't seen nearly as much public facing campaigning to fix it. For example, I don't think I've ever seen a PSA about eating less, whereas I've seen literally hundreds about cigarettes since I was a child.

Admittedly, most anti-obesity campaigns also seem to be neutered by lobbying. "Stop drinking soda" becomes politicized and turned into "move" by lobbyists. Taking a 30 minute walk is great advice for overall health, but will do absolutely 0 to address obesity.

I guess overall, there's no guarantee of success here, but I tend to view the shift in public sentiment about tobacco as a direct result of public health efforts. Which leads me to believe it's at least possible for other issues (obesity, alcohol). But certainly it is difficult and with unknown risk of failure.

I smoked for years and the public health campaigns had no positive effect on me or anybody I know. I actually developed a certain level of contempt for how much they manipulated the statistics, and generally took a non-evidence based approach to their regulation. The primary piece of government intervention that got me to quit was taxing the hell out of it. As much as I don’t like the government presuming it can make risk decisions regarding how I choose to live my own life, I like paying it taxes even less. My personal motivations were firstly avoiding the nuisance of dealing with the odor, and secondly the health impacts. I also expect that all the advertising restrictions has likely had an impact, but that didn’t personally influence me at all.

Obesity is very bad example. You don't wake up in the morning and decide to be obese this day and you don't wake up next morning and voila you are thin.

The campaigns against obesity don't make people thin, because half the time they don't even promote stuff that makes people thin. Half the time they promote diets that makes situation worse in the long term.

Campaigns against smoking did worked in the past. Drug use is down. Teenage v pregnancies are down. All stuff that involved campaigns.

Yeah. While I imagine quitting smoking isn't itself easy, the concept of "don't smoke anymore" is very different and easier to grasp than "be less fat". Not smoking is a direct action you can take; losing weight is a complex process that can involve many lifestyle and diet changes, and the exact route to losing weight can be very different for different people.

As far as I know, quitting smoking cold-turkey is one of the hardest ways of doing it, and most people change their habits gradually over time, so I don't know that your example is the best here.

You can't gradually stop smoking if you are addicted enough.

There are loads and loads of laws that prohibit smoking in all sorts of places and massive sin taxes among many other things. Chalking it 100% up to public health PSAs is inaccurate

Fair point. But still a far cry from current drug prohibition and alcohol prohibition of the 20s. Not being allowed to smoke in a restaurant is an entirely different animal than mandatory minimum jail time for anyone who possesses a cigarette.

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