Smoking is bad but prohibition is worse. Being subjected to the carcercal system is worse for your health than smoking.
Outright prohibition is massively expensive (prisons, police, loss of taxes), is a gift to criminals who will grow/import it illegally and sell it, and has outsized negative consequences on the people who use it anyways.
Partial prohibition (under X years of age), taxes, and public education work to reduce the amount of it, without most of the negative side effects, so we did those. If you could point at other measures that would further reduce the usage, which didn't come with huge drawbacks, I'm pretty sure we would jump on that as well. Unfortunately, it's not clear any such measures exist.
“Let us compare the results of good and evil. Offenses of this nature, if that name can be properly given to imprudences, produces no alarm; but the pretended remedy would spread a universal terror. Innocent or guilty, everyone would fear for himself or his connections; suspicions and accusations would render society dangerous; we should fly from it, we should involve ourselves in mystery and concealment, we should shun all the disclosures of confidence. Instead of suppressing one vice, the laws would produce other vices, new and more dangerous.”
- Jeremy Bentham, English (1748-1832)
I have my doubts that it will work, or at least that it would work here (in Canada). When I was in high school I knew too many people who were smoking illegally for me to think that you could just slowly creep the law up the age groups and not end up with a thriving black market. Hopefully I will be proven wrong though!
To describe why I think this is unlikely to work in another way, I think banning it for young people is really only effective because they have almost no money, and the illegal sales to supply them mostly aren't done through criminal gangs using it to fund terrible things, but slightly older people who are just using it to earn a little extra money. Both of those break down once you start banning it for older people, even if it's always been illegal for them.
What should be banned and made illegal is the method Big Tobacco uses to process tobacco into such a lethal product [1]. If we banned this process, but permitted manufacture, sale and consumption of smoking products containing only unadulterated natural (i.e. no additives except water) tobacco, within 10-20 years, the mortality rates of smokers would plummet and return to what they were prior to the chemical revolution of the 1950s, which is probably far less though we don't know by how much because the studies only appeared after the chemical revolution.
IMO, the principle is sound, but you could certainly argue about the rate at which the age should increase. 1 year per year seems like it would do the least harm overall.
Almost every other argument is absurd on-face. Even base appeals to "freedom" fall flat given the significant secondary and tertiary effects of smoke exposure, as well as the huge cost imposed on society by smoking.
On your last point, from what I've seen smoking saves society money because it kills people at much younger ages so governments don't have to pay for their health care for nearly as long.
But if we're limiting this to monetary costs only, I believe you're right. I saw a similar study from the UK circa ~2008ish that compared long term smoker/obese/healthy medical costs, and healthy people are indeed the most expensive (mostly because of tremendous end of life care costs).
Edit: I dug around a bit and found the study I was thinking of. It was actually a study on obesity (also not done by the UK), but used (non-obese) smokers as a group for comparison.
Link to article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2225430/
See Table 1 for lifetime medical costs.
But there's more value to human beings than their economic value, hence my talk about non-monetary costs. There's very real suffering that happens, and I'm not sure that's something you can put down in a spreadsheet somewhere.
Sure. I can believe that.
Is the unspoken claim here that it averages out to more than ~$60k/person?
Are you talking about non-monetary value here? I covered that in my first post in this thread.
The rest of the read was about monetary value only. Otherwise, which framing would you prefer?
There's no reasonable way to choose between the two framings. They are both obviously important. An accurate and purely quantitative utilitarian conversion of human suffering into USD is obviously beyond any reasonable assumption on the bounds of human rationality. A purely non-economic assessment ignores the possibility of real zero-sum tradeoffs caused by hard bounds on productive capacity.
Almost all economic activity is not zero-sum. Contrary to the intuitions of household budgets, at the scale of an economy operating over the timeframe of a generation, spending a dollar on X probably doesn't actually mean taking a dollar away from Y, especially if the productive/extractive inputs to X and Y are very different.
Therefore, it's more about finding a (necessarily vague & qualitative) exchange rate between the two. But at the order of $60K/yr in costs, I think that conversation is moot. Let's say retirees produce half of that value -- a grossly conservative estimate. That means we value "all the rest" at $30K/yr, which is prime facie absurdly low (what does a new SUV cost these days? How many "SUV new car feel vs. Corolla new car feel" units of happines equals the units of unhappiness caused by lung cancer? You get the point.).
If the number were $6M or even possibly $600K then the resource allocation question becomes more reasonable because there we approach the realm of starting to consider real zero-sum tradeoffs in what is possible. But at $60K with 50% to >100% offset, the number becomes too small to worry about the exchange rate. At most, in a pathologically broken system, we might, possibly, be discussing what we choose to do (not what is actually possible at minimal sacrifice). But it's not even clear to me that this is true in the US!
So, the framing seems silly, because once you do the work to figure out how to properly compare two radically different things you arrive at the conclusion that $60K is an order of magnitude away from forcing any sort of actual zero-sum resource allocation decisions.
Does that make sense?
I would have thought to just fine them, or tax purchases out of existence. No need for shackles.
NYPD officers approached Garner on July 17 on suspicion of selling single cigarettes from packs without tax stamps. After Garner told the police that he was tired of being harassed and that he was not selling cigarettes, the officers attempted to arrest Garner. When Pantaleo placed his hands on Garner, Garner pulled his arms away. Pantaleo then placed his arm around Garner's neck and wrestled him to the ground. With multiple officers pinning him down, Garner repeated the words "I can't breathe" 11 times while lying face down on the sidewalk. After Garner lost consciousness, he remained lying on the sidewalk for seven minutes while the officers waited for an ambulance to arrive. Garner was pronounced dead at an area hospital approximately one hour later.
Black markets are a reality under current economic conditions, and they're a reality even in completely legal markets (there's always someone willing to pay XX% less in exchange for YY% more legal risk). Putting extreme taxes and/or fines on smoking might pour gas on that market, but long-term trends just don't support its survival.
And as for fines: we already have a legal structure for that[1].
But there's also a trend against long term damage here: smoking rates have been declining for decades, and the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that higher taxes and civil penalties (like fines for smoking in parks) do reduce smoking across all ages and demographics. Fewer people smoking overall means fewer people who are subject to any sort of systemic abuse. That feels like a decent tradeoff to me, especially when we consider the knock-on effects of smoking itself (individual and community health, pollution, dental outcomes, &c).
What happens when they don't pay their fines? There has to be some backup plan and it's usually jail. You could keep increasing the fine for as long as they don't pay, but they you end up with loads of bankrupt people.
> or tax purchases out of existence
That creates a black market. In the UK, where tobacco taxes are high, it's quite easy to find small shops and individuals who will sell illegally imported cigarettes at a fraction of the price.
Sure, there will be a black market for it but a lot of the low effort entrants to the market and many new entrants will be discouraged. Overall there will be less people using it.
I generally understand that prohibiting something with the threat of incarceration is wrong, but without some legal interference smoking is not going to go away.
There's a lot more justification to go after manufacturers like Perdue Pharma who engage in fraud.
But there's no nuance regarding them in discussion of tobacco. They do likely have negative issues in terms of potential mouth cancer, but they're way less dangerous than cigarettes.