New Zealand imposes lifetime ban on youth buying cigarettes

This doesn't really change that much, our government has greatly minimised smoking by increasing the excise tax on tobacco by a large amount annually.

Every time the tax increase kicked in, the number of people accessing funded support for quitting spikes.

The Ministry of Health even encourages smokers to switch to vaping, which I thought is rather pragmatic in an age where people in NZ treat vaping as equivalent to smoking in terms of unpleasantness and the correspondingly expected politeness - don't vape near children, ensure your vapour doesn't blow onto other people, only vape outside, and even then, many outside areas in a hospitality business are designated smoking/vaping free.

Very few young people are taking up cigarettes, I have four teenaged sons, and in all their friendship circles, there's a total of two smokers. But, that leads me to our current problem is, we kinda screwed the pooch on how vaping entered the market, and how it was/wasn't regulated, and that's what all the cool kids are getting addicted to these days instead of ciggies.

So yeah. This policy won't change much, as the existing mechanisms have been rather effective.

At some point, free adults must not be prevented from taking actions that could potentially harm them (either in the short or long term). How far down that slope do we go? We worry about tobacco, when we allow megaconglomerates to fill the market full of heavily processed food? How far are we going to allow governments to tell us "you can't do this because it might/will hurt you, so we are making that decision for you".

This is also basically enshrined age discrimination, at least during the long transition period where everyone born before the threshold date is dying off.

Marijuana lobbists 1 vs Tobacco lobbists 0. Health be damned (in either case)

here me out. this needs to be replicated around the world.