New Zealand bans young people from buying cigarettes for life
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
After all no one is bitching that they can’t buy their favourite asbestos insulation anymore.
Cigarettes are the only thing I still get a craving for if I see someone smoking.
That, and coffee. Probably the two most practically addictive things I've ever done.
Yet the occasional ecstasy hits I actively do are, as sad as it sounds, the highlights of my life, even knowing it literally melts my brain. And I just love ketamin.
Even more pleasant to me: Benzos and benzolikes. I avoid taking them like the plague they are, but I think about them every single day, probably once every hour. They just feel so damn good and they are then only drug I could ever be addicted to.
Yet even thoughts of nicotine make me feel physically sick in my stomach and throat. I never want to take it again in any form.
I also strongly dislike coffee despite actively trying to start consuming it to become more human and do the "go for a coffee" thing they all love to do.
Everyone is different!
What's G?
> do the "go for a coffee" thing they all love to do.
Most places these days do chai / chai lattes. It's a perfect social coffee-substitute for me.
I only did chemsex a few times and long ago, but boy do those memories stick (in a good way, besides the STD).
It’s basically trying to push people to “less harmful” forms of nicotine.
But yeah, no doubt there will be a black market for real cigarettes, especially when they are still legal for people over a certain age.
The War on Some Drugs is widely recognised to be a war-against-some-drug-using-demographics, and has generally omitted or treated far more leniently drugs-of-choice of the rich and powerful (tobacco, alcohol, powdwered cocaine, highly asymmetric prosecution of marijuana, and wink/nod treatments of opiates use by dominant classes) whilst cracking down hard, so to speak, on drugs of the poor and minorities: crack cocaine, meth, black use of heroin (see especially the case of Billy Holiday), and the like. Even grey-market sales of cigarettes have proved lethal if your skin is the wrong colour within the US. Lee Atwater's infamous comments identify this as a deliberate race-based political strategy:
<https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...>
At least in the context of the original parent comment ("doing perfectly fine since prohibition")
Doing so with an arbitrary cut off seems irrational.
I think if they're banning cigarettes that's fine but why not start where it might make a difference: with people who actually smoke. banning 13 year olds from taking up the habit will have a lot less effect than moving people from smoking to vaping and I don't think there is anyone who legitimately cannot do that.
Isn't the end result the same for vaping?
I'm pretty sure there's no double blind, placebo controlled trial contrasting nicotine with cardiovascular health. Simply because for any adverse health effects to come up, it would need to be taken for a very long time, and no one would run such a study. As for tobacco, well, obviously. But it's not really controlled for nicotine, is it?
Sure, but the conclusion "therefore we can't know" is invalid. This is what we have observational studies and animal models for. You can absolutely do this in, say, rhesus monkeys and draw some reasonable conclusions if the trial results match up with observational results in humans.
There has been a bizarre crusade against vaping from public health and medical authorities for the last decade. This campaign relies mostly on misleading stats and fear tactics (for example, conflating bootleg THC cartridges using vitamin E acetate with much safer commercially-available nicotine cartridges). Looks like New Zealand saw through that at least.
[0]: https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/projects/outputs/nicotine-withou...
Going from smoking to vaping has a very clear, positive benefit.
There's concern that kids who wouldn't have taken up smoking are taking up vaping, though, which is fairly reasonable. In a perfect world, vaping might be a prescription smoking cessation tool, but in a realistic one it's gonna be impossible to keep it out of non-smokers hands.
Lying about science is kind of how we got into a lot of the trouble we’re in. I wish public health communicators would knock it off.
I heard a similar argument before smoking was banned in bars and pubs.
Didn't happen.
The idea of a ban like this has been floating around in NZ politics for years; the first version of it I heard had the cut-off birth year as 2000.
I’m trying to figure out if you’re even serious to suggest banning heroin worked when fentanyl is the leading cause of Millennials dying.
Humanity has done an insane amount of damage to society since everyone followed along in the "war on drugs", which stemmed from racial origins and continues to have such disproportionate impact. I'm glad we are (slowly) moving away from this atrocity :)
Banning things does not work and lulls people into a false sense of security imo. Guns in the UK are a good example of that.
https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/192/total_nu...
Criminals using illegal guns don't adhere to laws. Same issue in US.
Gun deaths are half what they were before the handgun ban was introduced. The UK doesn't make 5 year olds practice hiding under desks if there's an "active shooter". It doesn't need to, I don't think any country does apart from th eUS.
Of course not. Only the choosen ones. Is New Zeeland still a democracy ?
Sure you can't have the population strung out on heroin while effectively juicing them for their productivity but at the same time it's not like a junkie would be living a safe healthy productive life if it weren't for heroin.
And if the use isn't illegal you might as well allow it to be legally purchased to reduce the risk of people buying something unpure while promoting criminal drug gangs.
I'm not saying it should be purchasable from a corner shop. But if it's purchasable from a place that can provide support and help for the addict? Sure.
Or on other hand maybe we should ban ethanol too and treat it exactly like heroine. After all the damage and costs to society are pretty similar.
"Liberal Democracy" is not the same as "Libertarian Paradise"
Sidenote: it's 1am here in NZ, so we may not get a very informed discussion here.
https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/new-zealands-solution-ris...
NEJM[https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199710093371506]
Right now - I believe - the set age is 65 years, which is "common" worldwide, but quite a few countries have gone in recent years or are going to 66-67-68 :
It's an interesting idea though. Would you think all recreational activities should be regulated under the lens of collectivism? Let's say recreational driving -- to the beach or to the ski slopes or to visit friends in another city, or just a good old fashioned road trip -- is there a case that be prohibited because automobile infrastructure and accidents are an enormous financial cost to society and are also one of the leading causes of death in young people?
Also curious because this will depend a lot on how healthcare is paid for and how accessible is it. I expect NZ for example to do relatively more intervention in those cases than the US. But a quick search is not very informative.
Processed meat is a group 1 carcinogen. Are you going to ban that next? Wait so is sunshine. Are you going to ban sunbathing?
I see this line or argumentation a lot but never a real analysis of why it should be applied in this case. The reality is that people just identify something they want to change and rummage around for a justification and healthcare burden is convenient.
I'm no fan of smoking and think the world would be a lot better without it but this type of argument is not valid in most cases without a much stronger justification.
This is exactly what the proponents of these kind of laws want. It's all about control. There is a pop appeal that gets taken up by useful idiots - "rah rah they take our take dollars" - much like the border wall folks might try and blame x,y,z on illegal immigrants to get they ideology pushed through.
In Europe most countries tax cigarettes so much that they actually collect more in tax than smoking costs the healthcare system.
Either way, that's not an argument to ban but rather to increase tax or more general to make smokers bear the cost of related healthcare.
Obese people definitely cause an undue burden on the health care system. Why not tax them more, or force them to diet and exercise? It would be very cost-effective, allowing taxes to be used for more productive things. And as you said, individual freedoms are always constrained in various ways for the good of society. I don't see this as much different.
Somehow other countries do fine without these restrictions.
Health Canada says that starting March 17 next year, “people with a mental illness as their sole underlying medical condition will have access to MAID if they meet all of the eligibility requirements and the practitioners fulfill the safeguards that are put in place for this group of people.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/christine-...
https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/military-veteran-offe...
Full disclosure: I am not smoker.
Please find the evidence of taking over the capital. That website has every livestream mapped, timestamped etc so you can often look at multiple livestreams for any given time at multiple different spots. I see zero evidence supporting your claim. I do however see people protesting, at least one bouncy castle and lanes purposefully kept open for emergency traffic nearly all the time. You can just link the stream and timestamp url here when you find it.
Ok then, next ban alcohol please, then junk food. Are these less of a public health issue? I suppose they are just still socially more accepted, that is all. Isn’t this what laws are anyway, social constructs?
if you are banning cigarettes because of their addictive effects. Then you should ban every nicotine-based product.
If you are banning cigarettes because of their health effects, then why not regulate other similarly devastating products?
Then I reasoned that law can only do what is socially accepted. Banning cigarette is socially accepted, so they decided to do it.
In the end, it is about social acceptability first, not just addiction or health effects.
It's addictive, very damaging to health, and highly negative socially, in a way that vaping and alcohol don't match.
vaping? I agree.
Alcohol? less so. it is debatable, but I’m not an expert, so I will leave the details for someone else.
Junk food? This is the underrated one. In 100 years (I hope earlier), I bet this will be the first on the list
Yes, It is. The issue is that this acceptability is more often the result of propaganda (in the general sense of influencing public opinion.) than scientific/logical diligent public discourse.
Yeah, I know. As you already said too, "This is just how it works."
We need to attack other harmful products with a proportional acharnement to that we applied to tobacco. That was my first aim in all this (downvoted) affair.
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/sugar/big-fat-lies-sugar-p...
Or processes? Like maybe incomplete burning of stuff. Wood smoke from campfire is quite similar to tobacco smoke. And has quite the same carcinogenic effects. Maybe banning campfires would make sense and same applies to poorly burning fireplaces.
And now that I think about it, isn’t "pollution" in general a kind of smoke too? We are certainly not doing enough on this issue too.