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I never want to breathe in cigarette smoke on the sidewalk because of the damage to my health. Why does the individual freedom to do whatever you want overrule my individual freedom not to be affected by the externalities of your choices? The fundamental flaw in your argument is that you focus almost exclusively on individual right to the detriment of public good.

I don't disagree, but this position commits you to removing all petrol cars from cities, too.

Eliminating petrol cars from cities would be an objectively good thing for the air quality.

No offense personally, but the alternative to fuel burning cars is only cars with more toxic batteries that will pollute drinking water.

There are no honestly viable solutions currently on the market to our environmental crisis in place, it's just marketing to shift profit to another harmful money making industry.

Hauling a family of four on a bicycle to the hospital in a crisis in 2 feet of snow (for example) only goes further to highlight the small-mindedness our future is up against.

What do you think about hydrogen cars?

Don't smoke a cigarette anywhere near them... :/

They have a huge problem with unexpected detonations.

One of the best things about vaping has been that I'm pretty sure that there are less unintentional home fires than in past decades, because when they are dropped on a mattress, they usually do not burn... Another aspect that no one really considers.

Hydride cells can be punctured, smoked near, smoked on, it's fine, it's also old technology. Just about any vehicle can be retrofitted for this, and can sequester the hydrogen overnight from the air.

Let me introduce you to the magical concept of public transport.

Public transport was crippled during the pandemic for obvious reasons... Let's not forget that.

Also during an earthquake/power outage scenario would likely do the same, and cause far more dramatic loss of life if it was the only option.

It's a hard sell to people who want to be free and independent, and in control of their safety and time.

Getting rid of cars also means eliminating a huge volume of revenue from federal, state, and local government from related taxes... This means funding for bike lanes, roads, and even public transport, would evaporate.

Most of the busses in many major cities were also once electric (at a very high cost to cities), but now (somehow) have mostly gone back to diesel... No one is asking Why...

We still have major factories, ships, planes, and many other big business hallmarks that create the majority of pollution in the world (while the same companies try to portray that they are "green"). Conservation efforts are futile unless we start talking about the real issues, and create accountability, not if we leave rules up to profit seeking individuals and companies.

It's beyond a hard sell at this point for many people, and contradictory to the concept of a free society.

Back when we had mostly horses providing transit, they consumed more energy than cars on an individual basis too, and created health problems with their waste...

It's all just shifting the buck somewhere else, and not solving real underlying problems.

> Public transport was crippled during the pandemic for obvious reasons... Let's not forget that.

A once a century event shouldn't define the other 98 years.

> Getting rid of cars also means eliminating a huge volume of revenue from federal, state, and local government from related taxes... This means funding for bike lanes, roads, and even public transport, would evaporate.

This is not an issue. If people aren't buying cars, they'll have more money that they'll spend on other things or we can just raise taxes because people have more money.

> We still have major factories, ships, planes, and many other big business hallmarks that create the majority of pollution in the world (while the same companies try to portray that they are "green"). Conservation efforts are futile unless we start talking about the real issues, and create accountability, not if we leave rules up to profit seeking individuals and companies.

We're never gonna solve climate change if we only focus on the biggest issues. It's multifaceted problem.

> A once a century event shouldn't define the other 98 years.

But this is life now, things have not and likely will not return to "normal".

The previous comment was criticizing public transit being effected by covid. That effect is almost completely over.

Yes?

That's already a thing in some city centers (at least in Europe), and we're moving towards banning the sale of new petrol cars.

It's not an instantaneous process as society would pretty much collapse of we did so, but we are moving in that direction.

The difference is that gasoline powered engines add value to the world in exchange for the destruction they cause, while cigarettes are purely destructive.

But yes, we should eliminate gasoline powered vehicles as soon as feasible. This is something that's already going on.

Most people driving cars don't need to be, just as most people smoking don't need to be.

The main point is that it's easy to be personally offended by a cigarette, but the real damage is caused elsewhere. Sometimes we need to step outside of our selfish, interpersonal bubbles to see that.

Smoking has been banned successfully in most public places. You rights to clean air are reasonable to an extent, but outdoors it's a different story. Can you tell people driving gas burning cars and diesel vehicles to stay far away from humans? There has to be better reasonability in discussion of the issue.

Because breathing some second hand smoke outside in a city is objectively such a tiny problem that the benefits in personal freedom to the smoker outweigh the 10 seconds of your lifespan taken away.

Not as many people die from second hand smoke as is often presented. Even the campaigns that run ads to encourage quitting pay out salaries and generate funding to stay alive, so they've got to keep developing slogans and make charts to fund their existence.

If that was the case, the smokers, who had "first hand" smoke, would be dying a lot more frequently. Many of the people that died of lung cancer historically were exposed to asbestos products, which greatly skewed diagnoses for many many years... Many people who also never smoked in their lives died of lung cancer because of the prevalence of asbestos products in building materials as well. Most people don't know this because it would have resulted in many well embedded companies going bankrupt.

You'd also be surprised to know how smoking actually curbs incidents of rage, violence, suicide, and anger in people too, but there are no proper scientific studies because of the blinding bias promoted by companies that also seek to make a profit. There is a deeper discussion involved in quality of life versus quantity of life too, that is often overlooked, and no matter what regulation comes into play, nothing is going to stop a person from growing tobacco and smoking it even with prohibition, we know this from all the people that were murdered and made rich over bootlegging alcohol. This moral legislation is a waste of time, it's harmful to progress, and it's destructive to American freedoms that characterize the country.

Also ask yourself, why nicotine gum and patches (made to help people quit smoking) are always priced so high... This will further demonstrate the financial drive behind all aspects of tobacco. Tobacco was also a main driver of slave trade historically, meaning there are several companies that sold it and now are tied to investments and profit within the industry, including health care companies. CVS sold cigarettes for years, and that's likely a huge part of why they are still in business to this day.

I'm thoroughly convinced that moves like this have little to do with concern for the health of individuals. Smoking is a bad habit, but why is it always more polarizing than stock market manipulation, work wage theft, regulation of insurance industries, and so many other things that would improve the lives of citizens if not to shift profit elsewhere...

Government operates to protect companies and the wealthy now, not an individual making minimum wage with a smoking problem.

>You'd also be surprised to know how smoking actually curbs incidents of rage, violence, suicide, and anger in people too...

A lot of the claims you're making in these posts are going to need citations. This specific sentence (with the obvious exception of suicide) sounds as though you're describing a "nic fit", otherwise known as nicotine withdrawal. So of course getting more nicotine in your system is going to fix that.

Without cited sources, your claim is suspect because I can't confirm whether or not nicotine withdrawals were taken into account.

For the record, it's personal observation. I am in no way tied to the industry or empirical studies concerning the matter, and I don't think I presented the information as if I was providing empirical data.

I'd envision that data to back that claim would be impossible to find anyway, because no one has ever taken time to investigate it and publish a report due to societal bias on the matter.

The only real way to understand it yourself is to talk with a lot of smokers concerning their life experiences, and to also ask why in movies historically the first thing police would hand to a victim or person who has undergone a traumatic incident was often a cigarette.

> and to also ask why in movies historically the first thing police would hand to a victim or person who has undergone a traumatic incident was often a cigarette

"in movies"?

Even in real life...

Maybe we should ask why historically kids were given alcohol for all manner of ailments from teething to colds.

Or historically why cocaine was in Coca Cola?

If this is your argument, then we should ban most automobiles and gas stoves. Both are spewing out second-hand carcinogens effectively nonstop.

Yes, that actually sounds reasonable. Especially if you also account for the deaths caused by reckless driving.

You must be joking. How will anyone get their food? No automobiles = no supply chain.

Loads of American cities already have banned gas hookups in new buildings, including LA last month: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-05-27/get-ready-...

>in new homes

If we really cared about this, we'd start forced removals, because kids are the one's getting the most damage from that many particulates over their lifetimes.

> I never want to breathe in cigarette smoke on the sidewalk because of the damage to my health.

I’m always a little shocked when I hear otherwise very intelligent people make these sorts of statements about second hand smoke.

The second hand smoke you’d encounter on a sidewalk is completely harmless. Any affect, if any, to your health would be completely insignificant and unmeasurable.

Second hand smoke is harmful when exposed to heavy amounts of it in confined spaces for prolonged periods of time. Think decades not seconds.

In fact that was the original justification for indoor bans. It was in defence of staff who may encounter health issues after being exposed to indoor second hand smoke for 8 hours a day over decades. (Think single mom working at a bar) They weren’t put in place to preserve the health of customers, since any affect would be extremely minimal and voluntary.

I should try to dig this up some time but I recall reading once about one of the lead promoters of the first indoor smoking bans in NYC. He later had to step down out of principal, when things pivoted to outdoor bans. In his mind it would be completely irrational and unscientific.

Air pollution is definitely a significant problem but cigarette smoke is nothing more than a rounding error in the grand scheme of things. Look in to brake pad dust.

> The second hand smoke you’d encounter on a sidewalk is completely harmless. Any affect, if any, to your health would be completely insignificant and unmeasurable.

This sounds correct to me but keep in mind marketing the dangers of second hand smoke was an effective way to get people who thought of it as a solitary activity to thing of the secondary impacts. Most smokers don’t care about their long term health enough, but they may care about the health of those around them.

> The second hand smoke you’d encounter on a sidewalk is completely harmless. A

Fine, I don't want to smell it because I find the smell gross. Same concept.

Sure, but in general we don't ban products because they smell gross. I can buy a durian fruit, or put rotten eggs in a dumpster, or be homeless and unable to bathe and that's not illegal on its own.

There's a lot of stuff that's gross and obnoxious that isn't banned by the FTC or FDA.

Then farting outside should be illegal

This is one of the few joys I have left in life, don't take this from me.

Don’t worry, I will defend your right to dealt it to death

I find a lot of body odor or perfume and how heavily it is applied just as offensive, but I don't think people should be told to change because of that.

It’s not clear to me what you mean when you say it’s the same concept.

Your position is based on your own subjective preference rather than any objective fact.

We’ve gone from “your actions are having a direct negative impact on my health”, to “I’m not particularly fond of what you’re doing.”

Far from being the same, your position is actually very different conceptually.

The personal preferences of some aren’t valid reasons to ban things in public places for all. In most cases that would be a gross violation of human rights.

In my city the vast majority have a strong preference against pan handling. But it’s been made clear time and time again the pans handlers have every right to sit in public and ask for money, whether people like it or not. Moreover if they like they can also smoke a cigarette or bang a drum.

This is getting ridiculous imo.

I‘m sure some people find your breath and/or your body odor/perfume gross.

So should they be able to force you to wear a mask or keep a distance of say at least 6ft at all times?

>> same concept

Completely different concept.

That's personal preference vs. a potential health hazard.

Great example - masks. You may have had a personal preference not to wear a mask during the height of the pandemic, but that 'personal preference' puts others at a proven health hazard.

In this case, your 'personal preference' is irrelevant.

If second hand outdoor smoke really did have the affects you initially used to back up your point, then that would be a 'health hazard', and therefore important to the greater whole, and something to be considered taking legal action on.

Since you reduced your argument to 'I don't want to smell it', the underlying concept completely changes, and your statement is completely irrelevant.

I don't want homeless people sleeping on the bench cuz it feels gross

I change a couple of words and suddenly your reasoning sounds absurd.

Frankly I don’t care if it’s harmless, get that shit the fuck out of my face. It’s like someone deciding it’s okay to just let a massive fart out next to you. Harmless, but is it really appropriate? No.

Personal liberty isn't some absolute line. You have to understand that its impossible to grant everyone freedoms without creating some consequence.

> Why does the individual freedom to do whatever you want overrule my individual freedom not to be affected by the externalities of your choices? The fundamental flaw in your argument is that you focus almost exclusively on individual right to the detriment of public good.

This is insanity. The same argument can be applied to any personal liberty. Should washing hands be mandated by the government? After all, your freedom to not wash your hands increases my chances of catching disease. Let's ban bugspray too since exposure to second hand insecticides infringes upon your right to never be affected by another individual's choices!

The health dangers of breathing gasoline/diesel vehicle exhaust fumes are certainly as well known, and at least as risky. Yet the 'right' to drive a car or a semi seems to be invincible against this fact.

When I was approached by people gathering signatures for anti-smoking measures, I always asked how they arrived at the location. Invariably they did not walk or bicycle to it. Always shrugged off, because not their problem.

>The fundamental flaw in your argument is that you focus almost exclusively on individual right to the detriment of public good.

Who defines what "the public good" is? The same people who argue that rights must be eliminated for "the public good" are the ones who want to pass laws telling grown adults what they are allowed to do behind closed doors. From what plants they want to make illegal for you to grow, to what substances you want to ingest, to preventing you from playing poker with other consenting adults, to what language you must refer to people by - it is fundamentally anti-freedom.

>Why does the individual freedom to do whatever you want overrule my individual freedom not to be affected by the externalities of your choices?

This is the proper argument to make, and why I'm fine with banning smoking in certain public places, just like I'm fine with restricting a wide variety of other behaviors on public property that adults should otherwise be able to engage in behind closed doors. This is not what the federal government is doing in regard to Juul (or many other cases). They aren't addressing public behavior, they are passing laws and regulations to prevent you from behaving how you wish, on your own property, for your own good. The government shouldn't be in the business of telling consenting adults, at the point of a gun, what behaviors they aren't allowed to engage in behind closed doors.

I had similar thoughts when they banned flavored vapes. "For the sake of the children" means that me, as an adult, am not allowed to choose fruit flavors for an adult product when that is what I prefer. Seems hypocritical that I can buy blueberry vodka but not blueberry vape.

Except they didn't ban them they kept some weird loophole that allows disposable vapes to still be sold in any range of flavors so now people are just throwing away tons of batteries and for some reason Juul is getting banned who actually complied with the laws and took significant losses doing so. I don't think the people who are/were running juul are saints but if this is really about the kids they're really missing the target because all those teens moved onto other products.

Flavored ecig sales increased after the ban. https://www.cdcfoundation.org/National-E-CigaretteSales-Data...

This is the true absurdity. You can actively buy high percentage nicotine in any flavor you want online, delivered to your door with minimal age checks.

Lawmakers are activist on the matter because they believe it will somehow protect their own children from vaping... Truth is it's too late to prevent their own children from vaping, they've already caught them vaping.

Because of social media and populism, too many bad/harmful decisions are being made now in government. Most of it is driven by people seeking re-election or social media popularity more than by people who truly want to create positive change.

Just note that this isn’t anything new. I highly recommend the book “How to become a Federal Criminal” that shows 200 years of code and statute for all kinds of odd rules.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-to-Become-a-Feder...

Great post.

Now you got me thinking about one thing in particular.

Suppose we will have quite soon portable and discreet technology that can, through monitoring your BAC, or what have you, warn you that you're about to be overly drunk. It would stand to reason that for many folks out there who have An Alcohol Problem that technology like this could materially enhance their lives. Now that I think of this, something like this could even become the first practical widespread form of cybernetic enhancement, not that we don't already have plenty of awesome ones in the form of prostheses.

Just makes me wonder what kind of hurdles a company developing such a product would face.

People will always find ways to screw themselves up. Trying to ban this or ban that is like playing whack a mole. It ends up being a contest of who can shout the loudest to gain the government's attention, which isn't fair and also hurts the economy. The only answer in my opinion is deregulation + strong family values to help raise kids right.

> From talk about regulating the size of big gulps to mandating paper straws to legalization of marijuana and the banning of smoking products, this country is going insane.

Smoking marijuana and big gulps are very different from paper straws. Rules around smoking and soda sizes are the government legislating freedoms. I personally don't mind regulations here, but I agree it's taking away your liberty to some extent. Paper straws are mandated for a completely different reason: because they impose an externality that the user doesn't adequately pay for. Philosophically these bans are for the same reason we don't allow you to leave garbage on a public bench or dump toxic waste in a river. Again, you can debate the merits of single-use plastic legislation, but I wouldn't lump it together with smoking and soda bans at all.

But why ban paper straws and not plastic wrapped plastic bottles with plastic stickers on a pallet wrapped in plastic? Just eliminating the "sixpack" part of the packaging of sodas would save more plastics than the straws bans do.

Sure, but my point is more that legislation on e-cigarettes and soda is an issue of civil liberty, plain and simple, and legislation on plastics has little to do with them (unless you think that it's your right to pollute the environment). You might not think that it's effective, but it's not a case of the government telling you you can't do something for your own good.

Free healthcare (i.e. paid for by taxes) would certainly make me vote to eliminate known harmful things. I don't want to pay for your choices. It's more than moral legislation then.

> Now we're being told what we can and can't do in random ways in America and it's a really strange form of hypocrisy.

Are these ways random though, really? Or do they reflect that we have vastly divergent ideas of what society should be from the “my home is my castle” folks to the “we live in a society” folks. For the former it’s an abrogation of their sacred right to do whatever they want. For the latter it’s not wanting to be subjected to powerful corporations doing sociopathic things to make as much money as possible.

> For the latter it’s not wanting to be subjected to powerful corporations doing sociopathic things to make as much money as possible

For the former it's not wanting to be subjected to powerful politicians doing sociopathic things to make as much money as possible.

In some parts of the country you can easily get and use hard drugs in public and mutilate your genitals as a minor, but no big gulps or juuls.

> it's a really strange form of hypocrisy.

It's totally sane when looked at through one lens, and asinine when viewed through the other.

From a societal point of view, banning these products makes sense. They don't add value to the world, but they cause a lot of damage. The people who feel they are flipping the bill for the damaged caused don't see a reason that they have to pay it. The costs can be abstract, like increased medical costs, but they can also be direct, say, your child gets hooked on one of these and suffers some sort of medical complication.

From an individual perspective, then banning these products seems ridiculous. It's pretty common for people to believe that they aren't impacting others with their choices (which is wrong), or they acknowledge the negative impacts, but they just don't care.

Generally speaking, if you want to maintain a freedom, it is advisable to not bother other people with your activity.

Your first view is sane only on an individual, isolated basis. If you step back and see that a particular e-cig is banned while the original (and the causes for this type of product) is still legal, then any sane argument gets throw out of the window. If legislators wanted to remove causes of societal damage, they would ban the use of nicotine on cigarettes, that have the biggest share of nicotine consumption.

So why not ban actual cigarettes? Why only Juul?

Because millions of people were smokers and that necessitated a long-term strategy for dealing with cigarettes. And that strategy is basically, increase taxes on them a little bit every year until they become so damn expensive that people quit using them and they are de facto banned.

Juul is new enough that the blunt approach will work. Plus, it's not a plant that grows all over, making a black market for them less likely to spring up.

You can always to what new zeland did, and ban them for people born after year X (2008 in NZ)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59589775

Yes, yes, black market and all that, but that's true for vapes too. And drugs.