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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

> I grew up in a household with two smoking parents, and it sucked.

It sounds like you're saying that their freedom to inflict harm on you was more important than your freedom from the harmful health effects of secondhand smoke. Can that be true?

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I presume the two smokers did more than just smoke. If they were parents They probably also provided food, education, love and whole lot of other things than just secondary smoke. Life tends to be a complex mix of good and bad.

For sure, and I'm assuming the parents were great in every other respect. Assuming the best — that they didn't understand the harm of secondhand smoke — wouldn't a ban have been helpful to them in the same way that a ban on lead paint is helpful?

Sounds like Prohibition but for cigarettes. We know how that went. We also know what banning marijuana hasn't worked out too well. At the start of Covid pandemic South Africa banned the sales of cigarettes for about three months. Result was lots of unscrupulous people became rich [0][1].

[0]https://businesstech.co.za/news/trending/468724/governments-... [1]https://www.africanews.com/2022/06/17/cigarette-smuggling-th...

I didn't know that. It is double ridiculous, because smoking reduces the probability to get COVID19.

Isn't there a big difference between what Australia is doing and those prohibitions? I think one of the main reasons those went so terribly is that people were already used and/or addicted to drinking/smoking, so of course they continued doing those things illegally. But this policy tries to make sure that people never start smoking, by making it not legally available to every who is now young enough to most likely not have started already. Those who smoke currently can (with this policy) continue doing so legally, so there's less demand for black markets etc.

I can't fault the theory and can only share an anecdote. It was illegal for school children to smoke when I was in school, 80s into early 90s. So much so that kids caught smoking were expelled from school. Kids still smoked. Perhaps it was a different time and perhaps this time it is being done right.

I think what it comes down to is who is decided what's harmful and do you trust those institutions.

Is spanking harmful? It seems close to one of those things that get one into trouble with CPS

What about letting a kid walk home from school on their own? We've seen parents get into trouble for that.

How about letting the kid watch tv or eat too much junk food?

What about teaching them certain ideas, ranging from racism to creationism to socialism to Amish-like beliefs?

If you presume that parents love their children and want to do what's best for them and you inform the population of the collective belief on what is good or bad for them, parents will do their best to make careful trade-offs and are in the most informed and most invested position to make those decisions.

Obviously some people are just terrible parents, but if there's any doubt at all I think we should err on parental sovereignty. Likewise, when considering what is beneficial or harmful to one's self, for the same reason, I think we should err on the side of individual sovereignty.

There are cases where individual or parental authority should be overridden, but to my mind those should be chosen very, very carefully.

Involuntarily inflicting second-hand cigarette smoke on a child is unambiguously harmful and there's no credible alternative interpretation or slippery slope involved here.

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