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Comment by vvanpo | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, I understand that complete prohibition for drugs and alcohol just don't work. But I have a difficult time squaring that against my feelings towards tobacco, where I feel it would be so much easier for me to quit if I wasn't tempted by its availability at every corner store.

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What are your thoughts on a retail cigarette sale system such as in Canada, where they may be available in every convenience store, but there can be absolutely no signage or advertising, and they're kept in an opaque cabinet with no labels on it?

https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/keeping-bc-healthy...

https://www.ontario.ca/page/tobacco-vendor-fact-sheet

I completely quit smoking tobacco.

By switching to flavored vape cartridges, which the FDA then helpfully made illegal in a fit of moral panic.

Pity, because as far as anyone can tell, vaping is at least two orders of magnitude less deleterious to health than smoking.

So these days I refill my old cartridges and nurse a grudge against FDA. I haven't backslid to smoking, but if they ban high-nicotine salt juice entirely, I don't know what I'm going to do.

Do you think making it harder to get would help?

Maybe requiring a license to sell tobacco, and limiting the number of licenses in a municipality based on population?

Or putting the stores in industrial zoned areas rather than commercial/residential?

I oppose prohibition for the moral reason that adults ought to be allowed to make these choices for themselves and the practical reason that it doesn't seem to work well anyway. but that's a fair point. this might actually be a good use case for zoning. imo the happy medium is "manufacturers are allowed to sell X, as long as they make it as safe as it intrinsically can be" and "you're allowed to buy X, but you might have to go out of your way to do it". people that want to avoid X or pretend it doesn't exist would have that option too.

What if you could buy individual cigarettes instead of a pack of 20? I feel like 20 is the exact amount you need to smoke to get hooked. If you could go buy like 1 or 2 so that you could enjoy a drink and social smoke with a friend, I feel like the rest of the pack would not be sitting around your house tempting you. Like why the fuck is it illegal for me to buy just 1 cigarette?! Why is it that I need to buy a pack of 20?

> I feel it would be so much easier for me to quit if I wasn't tempted by its availability at every corner store

Canadian bans on packaging and promotion are one solution. Another is to mandate tobacco products, or certain tobacco products, be mail ordered.

It probably wouldn't

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