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Court upholds town bylaw banning anyone born in 21st century from buying tobacco products

https://apnews.com/article/tobacco-ban-21st-century-brookline-massachusetts-e9d54d60ddfe23f9d7e06eb724f5449a

A Massachusetts town that adopted an unusual ordinance banning the sale of tobacco to anyone born in the 21st century is being looked at as a possible model for other cities and towns hoping to further clamp down on cigarettes and other tobacco products.

Court upholds town bylaw banning anyone born in 21st century from buying tobacco products

89 comments

tal

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Realistically, I assume that anyone who wants tobacco and would be affected is just going to buy it outside city limits.

remotelove

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Yep. My hometown restricted beer and wine sales and that is exactly what we did. It was a 15min drive instead of what could have been a 5min drive.

ikidd

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We had a religious township do that, now the highway to the nearest wet town has the highest rate of drunkdriving deaths in the province.

TexasDrunk

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I lived in a dry county growing up. If someone was headed "across the bridge" it meant they were heading to the border of the next county where they had a bar and 4 liquor stores within a half mile stretch.

It's weird that I grew up in a county that didn't sell alcohol but there were more liquor stores within 10 miles than there were grocery stores.

quicksand

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Username checks out. Dry/wet town/county lines are a very common experience there

TexasDrunk

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When you're as drunk and Texan as I am you know where to go to get liquor.

It's getting less prevalent. Last I heard my hometown is now wet and the closest town down the street serves beer at the only restaurant there. In the last 20 years things have started loosening up a little.

Artyom

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People will drive to county limits, but policies like this have been shown to actually be quite effective. Even if you are willing to drive to a neighboring county, will you do it as often?

Scubus

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No, I'll just stock up on more at once.

gamermanh

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policies like this have been shown to actually be quite effective

United States, 1920s, alcohol.

Very much the opposite

Artyom

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That's a very different scenario and it required committing crimes to drink. County-level policies like cigarette bans and sugar taxes have legal ways for you to bypass them, but still discourage use.

pulaskiwasright

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This does seem super anti democratic. Banning things for only people of a specific group made up of people who were born into it is pretty gross no matter what it is. If it’s worth banning then it should be banned for everyone. Or no one.

Telodzrum

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It’s perfectly democratic; it is, however, horribly illiberal.

Fredselfish

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This is like Texas when they had dry counties. This didn't stop people from drinking they just drove futher to buy it. This law is dumb they are now going lose tax dollars to the next towm over.

Wanderer

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How do you stop a Mormon from drinking your alcohol?

Invite 2.

I don't really know Mormons but for some reason I remember that joke.

tigeruppercut

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I heard it a bit different: What's the difference between Jews and Mormons? Jews don't recognize Jesus as the messiah and Mormons don't recognize each other in the liquor store. (I think it works with baptists too)

Fredselfish

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Yeah that the one I heard.

harderian729

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These are both dumb jokes.

prole

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Dry counties still exist (outside of Texas at least).

bane_killgrind

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The manufacturers are banned from selling to new markets.

pulaskiwasright

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Effectively banning something for a group of people who had no choice about being in that group. If you can’t ban something for yourself then it shouldn’t be banned for others.

bane_killgrind

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All I'm reading is the government isn't banning the sale is a market that has already been exploited.

pulaskiwasright

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That’s a very weaseling way to describe it though. It may hold legal water, but you have to be willfully ignorant to not see how it’s banning a group of people buying something based on the group they were born into.

bane_killgrind

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It should be banned for everyone. This exception is just allowing the businesses to wind down slowly.

Did I get a choice being in the group that these people marketed their poison to? What about my rights to have safe products available?

It's not anti democratic to make laws against harmful things. Specifically harmful things that make you quickly chemically dependent on it.

pulaskiwasright

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It's not anti democratic to make laws against harmful things. Specifically harmful things that make you quickly chemically dependent on it.

I didn’t say it was. Banning only a specific group is what’s anti democratic.

bane_killgrind

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Listen we already have age restrictions on different drugs, this is just progressively raising the age limit on a specific one.

The alternative is ban them outright, putting thousands of people immediately out of work, leave small businesses with thousands of dollars of garbage stock, and leave addicts without any supply.

Do you think that or continuing unrestricted sales are better options? Go cry more, stop advocating to flip the table.

airdi

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They already do this alcohol why not tobacco

pulaskiwasright

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They don’t do it for alcohol. Kids eventually become adults and old enough to make their own choices and decide to buy alcohol not. This law would ban people born too late from ever being allowed to buy.

Ultraviolet

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Alcohol has an age requirement that stays where it is, if you're 20, you can buy it in a year. This would be if you're 23 right now, the age requirement is 24. Next year, you'll be 24 and the requirement is 25. In 50 years, you'll be 74 and the requirement is 75, until eventually no one alive is old enough to smoke.

Crikeste

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This is a law banning current generations and all following them from the product. This isn’t your average, everyday prohibition.

Not sure if I’m for it or against it, but it is certainly something to pay attention to.

kirbowo808

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I understand banning something that’s basically super unhealthy and has direct links to cancer but at the same time, ppl have been smoking and consuming drugs/alcohol for centuries and by stopping ppl from doing it, it’s basically gonna encourage a new generation to try it.

If they’re gonna start banning things like this, then maybe they should also ban alcohol and talcum powder too since they also have links to cancer as well.

Things like this, ppl should be taught about the effects of drugs/cigarettes/alcohol in a safe environment, not just ban things cuz the law says otherwise. You can’t have a black/white approach to those things.

HurlingDurling

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Prohibition has never and will never work, and we have the data to prove it. However, these laws are made by people who want to go and say "I did a thing, re-elect me peasants!"

westyvw

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Is it not just a ban on selling a product? People could grow tobacco, and roll their own.

I didn't read the law, but from the article it looks like it is just a ban on the sale of the product, not personal choice to actually use tobacco.

nutsack

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I smoked the most before I was legally allowed to do it

UnderpantsWeevil

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Congrats on cutting back. That shit is terrible for you.

nutsack

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i quit when I started running it was automatic

UnderpantsWeevil

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I can definitely see how those two things would conflict.

spyd3r

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Politicians making smoking cool again with this one stupid trick.

Crack0n7uesday

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Prohibition of cigarettes won't work, at best people will just go across an imaginary line to buy cigs, at worst it creates an unregulated black market. Just look at how alcohol prohibition went and the current war on drugs is going. If you want to have any sort of meaningful impact on cigarettes create more sin taxes on the product so people will decide on their own to just not buy them.

UnderpantsWeevil

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Prohibition of cigarettes won’t work

I mean, it depends.

Worth noting that a lot of historical "prohibition" efforts have been tools for hyper-policing certain neighborhoods and ethnic groups rather than efforts to actually prohibit the substance.

Re: former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Did the War on Drugs succeed in breaking the back of the Vietnam-Era antiwar movement and the mass incarceration/assassination of 60s/70s era Civil Rights Leaders? Ab-so-fucking-lutely. In that sense, they were enormously successful.

On the flip side, if you look at serious efforts to regulate sale and distribution of controlled substances, there's some cause for optimism.

Are Dry Counties Safer than Wet Counties?

While dry counties may not be as effective in reducing alcohol-related harms as some people may hope, there is evidence to suggest that other restrictions on alcohol sales may be beneficial. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests limiting the number of days when alcohol can be sold, citing research that suggests that doing so has shown to decrease consumption, alcohol-related violence, and DWIs

Similarly, the CDC also recommends limiting the time in which alcohol can be sold as research has found that increasing the sale of alcohol by two or more hours resulted in increased consumption and motor vehicle crashes.

I should further note that infrastructure improvements, like bus/rail transit and active cab services, do a lot to reduce the negative externalities of excess consumption. Similarly, access to affordable housing and medical services can curb the use of alcohol and heroin as stand-ins for treatment of pain management and depression. And environmental improvements (particularly, de-leading of the water supply and clean-up of toxic dumping sites that contribute to chronic ailments) can reduce demand for pain management drugs at the root.

The idea that you simply can't do anything about drug abuse and its consequences is heavily predicated on the assumption that our Drug Wars have sincerely sought to improve the lives of residents. When policymakers are allowed to pursue reforms that include public services and societal improvements, municipalities report significantly better results than when they're restricted purely to policing and other punitive measures.

Dasus

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In that sense, they were enormously successful.

Well, yeah, but we all know we're talking about people not using the prohibited substances if a prohibition "works".

In that sense, no prohibition has worked.

You can only regulate. Regulation is beneficial. Banning is not.

You can do things about substance abuse. You can not do things about substance use.

UnderpantsWeevil

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In that sense, no prohibition has worked.

We've had a litany of interventions in the history of the US regulatory system. Prohibitions on lead in paint and asbestos used for building insulation have been successful everywhere we've funded them. Prohibitions on trade with Cuba have kept Havana Club out of our bars and El Habanos off our cigar store shelves for decades.

You can regulate a business out of existence. You can regulate a whole industry out of existence. But you do need to intend to pursue these ends. You can't block narcotics up front with your DEA hand and smuggle them in through the back door with your CIA hand.

You can do things about substance abuse. You can not do things about substance use.

You can establish a sufficient amount of bureaucracy, surveillance, and risk such that doing a particular kind of business is no longer fruitful. There are certainly some prohibitions that are harder to enforce than others. Growing marijuana is borderline trivial, so the job of expunging the plant from existence becomes an enormous uphill climb. But refining cocaine or heroin? Halting the manufacture boutique designer synthetics that can only really come from a handful of high tech manufacturers? That's comparably quite easy.

The trouble sets in when you recognize drug use as a symptom of a deeper problem, rather than an end on its own. Prohibiting Oxycodone pushed more people into heroin. Policing heroin forced people on to fentanyl. The opioid addiction (and chronic pain that inspires its use) persist as we play wack-a-mole with alternative treatments.

What do you do with the hundreds of thousands of junkies, once you've policed their drugs of choice out of the marketplace? That's a problem we don't really want to solve. So we turn our backs and let the opioids flow again, because its easier than dealing with a sudden influx of withdrawal victims.

Dasus

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Prohibitions on lead in paint and asbestos used for building insulation have been successful everywhere we’ve funded them.

I'm having a hard time believing you're arguing in good faith with comments like that.

You very well know we're talking about substances as in psychoactive substances as in psychoactive substances people consume to experience a slightly altered state.

No-one is sniffing asbestos. (Well, guess they sort of did back when there were cigarette filters made of asbestos.)

And lead is still very much an issue in the US, despite no-one using it deliberately. A new study calculates that exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood stole a collective 824 million IQ points from more than 170 million Americans alive today, about half the population of the United States

But refining cocaine or heroin?

Both are also rather trivial. Not really any harder than making your own cannabis shatter.

Halting the manufacture boutique designer synthetics that can only really come from a handful of high tech manufacturers?

Haha, lol. Do you have any idea how many kilos of drugs are pumped out by university labs, people's personal ("personal" in the sense that they're a drug dealer/manufacturer who invest a ton of money into a personal lab for that very purpose, but it's still small, ie personal) labs, etc? You're way overestimating this, bruv.

Imagine you're a chem student at a university. You make 1 liter of LSD. You can smuggle that out in a soda-bottle. 1 liter of LSD would be, if sold at single-dose street value, around 100 000 dollars. (Obviously cheaper when you manufacture and sell wholesale, but still.)

And that's LSD, which is highly recognisable illicit substance. You can make all sorts of semi-illegal drugs that laws haven't even caught up yet. (Golden times of this was around 2005-2015, I'd say) Dozens and dozens of technically legal substances, that are still pretty legal in most of the world.

Not to mention people are literally growing their own coca bushes in their homes. Not that you'll yield much anything besides leaves to chew on, much less make into coke and sell, but the point is the prohibitions do not work and will never work.

Hell, all hell is about to break loose in the easy manufacture of hardcore drugs.

This came out in 2015: https://www.nature.com/articles/521281a

It's an article about how there's urgent regulation needed into GMO yeast. Yeast that seems like normal yeast, but also happens to biosynthesise opiates. And you can make them biosynthesise pretty much anything soon enough. They've also done it with cannabis, but as you rightly pointed out, growing it is super easy, and the effect people like relies on the entourage effect, so it's not gonna be one people will get onto, but opiates and cocaine are certainly doable.

So no. Prohibitions (of psychoactive substances — and you know perfectly well that's what we meant) never work.

once you’ve policed their drugs of choice out of the marketplace?

Please do tell, as no-one has ever managed that. Do you have any idea how easy it is to get drugs in prison, the one place where you'd think you shouldn't be able to get them, that's being "policed" and shouldn't have an easily accessible drug market?

UnderpantsWeevil

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No-one is sniffing asbestos.

The functional argument is that you can't ban things because people will simply go to the black market for them. Why don't we have a robust trade in black market lead paint and asbestos wall filling?

Do you have any idea how many kilos of drugs are pumped out by university labs

Go ahead and lets see the numbers. My money is that its orders of magnitude less than cocaine coming out of Columbia or even weed out of Canada.

there’s urgent regulation needed into GMO yeast

So we're back to regulation being a functional solution to control the distribution of substances?

So no. Prohibitions (of psychoactive substances — and you know perfectly well that’s what we meant) never work.

Then why bother trying to regulate GMO yeast? Or leaded gasoline for that matter?

Please do tell, as no-one has ever managed that.

The push towards fentanyl has been in response to the very successful policing of heroin and oxycodone traffic. When you're not rushing these drugs in through the back door with another federal agency, you can - in fact - successfully control the traffic of a given substance.

Dasus

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Why don’t we have a robust trade in black market lead paint and asbestos wall filling?

Because those aren't substances which people want to use, unlike psychoactive substances? I thought I made it quite clear we're talking about prohibitions of substances, not bans on toxic paints. To pretend you don't understand the difference between weed/beer/energydrink/cocaine/heroin and asbestos/lead/microplastics is downright incredible. As in, I don't believe that you don't actually understand the difference, and think you're just pretentiously pretending you don't, so you don't have to admit how wrong you are in the argument.

Go ahead and lets see the numbers.

Let's see the numbers of illicitly and covertly produced substances? Ah yes, let me just call up the international drug trade association and ask them for the exact amounts. :D

is that its orders of magnitude less than cocaine coming out of Columbia

You can easily go through several grams of coke a night. You won't be able to go through even a gram of LSD. A gram would be 1000 times the normal dosage. Importing is hard business, and risky at that. If you can produce a synthetic stimulant without the risk of getting caught by the police, and if the stimulant is even an NPS, then even getting caught will not mean as much prisontime as with coke.

I've been in the drug trade for about two decades. You're talking out of your arse, and completely illogically. I've had this conversation a million times, it's just evolved a bit over the years. Not much, but it has.

Then why bother trying to regulate GMO yeast? Or leaded gasoline for that matter?

REGULATION =/= PROHIBITION.

If you'd have actually read my earlier comments you'd have noticed this:

#You can only regulate. Regulation is beneficial. Banning is not.

#You can do things about substance abuse. You can not do things about substance use.

The push towards fentanyl has been in response to the very successful policing of heroin and oxycodone traffic. When you’re not rushing these drugs in through the back door with another federal agency, you can - in fact - successfully control the traffic of a given substance.

"very successful"

Are you on heroin, currently? Because I don't know why else you would say something so completely ridiculous.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/fentanyl-and-us-opioid-epidemic

UnderpantsWeevil

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Because those aren’t substances which people want to use

They clearly are, as we'd been using them prior to the enacted ban for decades.

I thought I made it quite clear we’re talking about prohibitions of substances, not bans on toxic paints.

Do you believe paint isn't a substance? FFS, have you ever heard of huffing paint?

To pretend you don’t understand the difference

This isn't a question of pretending. This is a question of economic incentive to do trade and the impacts regulation/prohibition has on those incentives.

REGULATION =/= PROHIBITION.

Both increase the cost of transactions for the purpose of discouraging certain forms of trade by assigning bureaucratic hurdles and civil penalties with legal transactions. A regulation on gasoline that prohibits including lead in the formula is both a REGULATION and a PROHIBITION.

Are you on heroin, currently?

Analysts say the opioid epidemic started with the overprescription of legal pain medications in the 1990s, but it has intensified in recent years due to influxes of cheap heroin, fentanyl, and other synthetic opioids supplied by foreign drug cartels. The crisis has become a scourge on the economy, a threat to national security, and a major foreign policy challenge.

This was the root of the problem. Prohibiting reckless prescription of opioids in the 1990s would have averted the crisis in its infancy.

some_guy

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Sounds like you would appreciate The End of Policing. It more or less advances that public services (socialism) would be more effective at addressing societal ills. I agree.

UnderpantsWeevil

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Sounds like you would appreciate The End of Policing.

A copy is sitting on my bookshelf.

some_guy

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I'll buy you a beer when we cross paths.

jonne

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In Australia there's already huge issues with a black market and criminal gangs, and that's just with cigarettes being super expensive (like $50+ for a pack).

I think governments should really think about making sure their policies don't backfire, and keeping legal, affordable supply should be part of that.

Although to be fair, the tax on cigarettes does tend to work, Australians generally don't smoke, if you see someone smoking they're usually a recent immigrant or just old.

UnderpantsWeevil

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In Australia there’s already huge issues with a black market and criminal gangs

If you dig into the history of drug/alcohol smuggling in the US, a lot of what you come back to is one branch of the US government doing the enforcement and another branch using black market trade as an illicit money laundering / revenue scheme. I would not be shocked to discover that a bunch of that Australian black market activity is a feature of prohibition rather than a bug. But again, that goes back to the real goals of prohibition. Is this an effort to curb cigarette consumption or just a means of implementing a shake-down of retail consumers?

I think governments should really think about making sure their policies don’t backfire

They have. And gallons of ink have been spilled illustrating why certain policies are more successful than others.

But there's different measures of success. Again, to go back to Nixon, the goal of nationally prohibiting weed consumption wasn't to keep people from ingesting THC. It was to target sections of the college youth and antiwar movements who preferred weed over booze. In that sense, the policies didn't backfire. They functioned exactly as designed.

the tax on cigarettes does tend to work, Australians generally don’t smoke, if you see someone smoking they’re usually a recent immigrant or just old.

There was a big rash of Boomer-era cigarette deaths that left a serious psychic wound in the GenX / Millennial generation. I grew up watching older family members suffer and die from lung cancer. It heavily influenced more proclivity to smoke. And I've got more than a few peers who could say the same.

But Zoomers/Alphas have "vaping" now, plus an abundance of marketing and propaganda intended to tell them that this kind of nicotine consumption is actually harmless. They didn't grow up watching older family members huddling over oxygen masks and spitting up black snot all day and dying in their mid-50s to three-pack-a-day habits.

I think living through that shit has incentivized the idea of cigarette taxes as a remedy. But its the drop in consumption that made taxation possible in a way that - say - a higher gasoline tax to fight climate change or a higher income tax rate to fund universal Medicare/caid isn't.

bier

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If you ban tabacco all out its going to create a huge black market. Addicted smokers that don't want to stop aren't just going to stop.

But, raising the legal smoking age with one year every year might work. Tabacco use is already pretty low for GenZ as smoking isn't "cool" like it was in the 70s.

dangblingus

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Harm reduction is a thing. The law will mean that fewer people will start smoking. If fewer people smoke, fewer people will wind up in the hospital with lung cancer, meaning less money needs to be spent on healthcare and less crippling medical debt. Arguing against creating a law because "criminals gon criminal" is a non-starter.

There already is a tobacco black market anyway.

corsicanguppy

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Prohibition of cigarettes won’t work[:] at best people will just go across an imaginary line to buy cigs, [and] at worst it creates an unregulated black market.

Oh, I think it does worse than create an underground market.

But millennials won't get tobacco HERE. Soon, maybe the next town will decide they won't get them THERE. Think globally, act locally.

LifeInMultipleChoice

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Seriously this will make cigarettes look cool and rebellious again to young kids, and guess who will have cigarettes? The same person who sells other illegal substances. Poof, you have now made cigarettes a gateway to cocaine, meth, heroine, and none of it is regulated so deaths from fentanyl just with have easier access to our youth.

Wermhatswormhat

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Smoking is not good for your health, but we as Americans are free to make that choice for ourselves. I think that’s the definition of unconstitutional. Banning something like that is only going to make it more widespread and sketchy. Look at the war on drugs and what it’s done, but sure it’ll work this time.

echo64

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I don't think "unconstitutional" is the word you want here. There's endless things you are not free to purchase or choose for yourself.

Shiggles

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“Unconstitutional” == I don’t like it

Literally as deep as most people’s understanding goes.

Scubus

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It's more like unconstitutional == government overreach

Also what language do you code in?

hornface

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Not going to argue about whether or not it's constitutional (because I don't know), but I just wanted to point out that this case is slightly more complicated than just "you're not allowed to purchase". It's "you're not allowed to purchase.... BUT other people are". Which means it's potentially a question of discrimination, which is maybe not as cut-and-dry as a "normal" law banning a substance across the board.

wrath_of_grunge

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The cost of cigs is also artificially inflated in many places. I’m glad to see less of the younger crowd smoking, that’s a good thing. But doing it in these ways just feels plain un-American.

We let an awful lot of things that are bad for us slide, because the effects aren’t as visible.

bobs_monkey

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Back to the old days of buying smokes out of some guy's trunk.

BakerBagel

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Thank god i can gi back to buying individual smokes when i am hammered at the bar. Nothing worse than smoking a pack of cigarettes over the course of a week because i had a craving while drunk.

CaptainEffort

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Honestly tho yeah, just look at prohibition.

bobs_monkey

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That's what I mean. As someone else pointed out, all it does is make it inconvenient, and it opens up a black market. People are gonna do what they want. Either this means they'll just drive to another city/county/state, or someone is going to acquire them in bulk and sell them on black alleys.

In my mind, a more effective approach is to regulate where someone can smoke. There are a number of CA cities where it's effectively illegal to smoke a cigarette within city limits (aside from private property), which drives smokers into little nooks and crannies. Ultimately most people want it out of sight and out of mind, and to not walk into a cloud of it on a sidewalk or have their children seeing/smelling it, which is 100% reasonable. But telling someone they're not allowed to buy it is going to incentivize some to seek it out more.

umbrella

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i hate tobacco too but this is going to backfire just like every other attempt at drug prohibition ever, just you wait.

aceshigh

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I wish them luck with that. If someone wants cigarettes they’ll get cigarettes. I bought them under age and when they were over $6 in my city I’d buy them in other states or duty free or the black market.

remotelove

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I grew up with these types of laws and they are just more of an inconvenience than anything else. My old hometown restricted the sale of beer and wine for many years, but it was easy enough just to go to the next town over. (Simultaneously, the town hosted a state managed liquor store which was extremely weird.)

If smaller communities want to restrict products like that, whatever. Hell, even restricting some services is OK as long as it's not discrimination based.

Personally, I wouldn't live in one of those places. It's not about the tobacco but more about the people who are elected by those communities to make laws like that. If smaller communities of like-minded people want to make their own laws like that, so be it. I wouldn't be like-minded, in that case.

MedicPigBabySaver

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Good ol' Brookline. Bunch of donkeys.

harderian729

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Sad.

Let people put in their bodies what they want.

Really telling how hypocritical most people are. They only support legalizing the drugs they use, and are completely cool with vilifying those who use different drugs.

corsicanguppy

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Let people put in their bodies what they want.

In countries where we all bear and share the cost of healthcare, this is a different issue. Please don't say you're such a big fan of self-harm.

mob

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But this is also an article about Massachusetts...

nonfuinoncuro

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... where Romney introduced mass health for everyone

mob

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If you consider that healthcare for everyone, then America as a whole bears and shares the cost of healthcare for everyone because of Obamacare?

nonfuinoncuro

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I mean it does already when people use ERs as primary care offices and we neglect preventative care until you show up to the hospital with some catastrophic problem we have to legally take care of because of EMTALA

kaffiene

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Good.

PhlubbaDubba

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Please for the love of God watch this before commenting some dumb shit about "it's my right to expose everyone around me to airborne toxic materials!"

https://youtu.be/GMOyNgLSX2g?si=XXCJp4kkRcWDGMB-

misspacfic

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yeah, being exposed to cigarette smoke is not ideal.

my issue with this law is that it feels immensely inconsistent: cars, and guns kill a huge amount of people per year. likely more than cigarettes, but i can't verify that rn. why not put some effort into those problems?

Scubus

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Cigarettes are responsible for about 480,000 deaths per year. Guns related deaths make up just over 48,000. And about 42,000 for vehicle related deaths.

Honestly, I'm quite surprised, I would've guessed that you were correct.

Edit: there is a huge difference though. Most cigarette smokers are self inflicted. As far as second hand smoke, if you can prove damages as a result of it I'm fairly certain you could sue. Enough of that would discourage people from smoking around others without consent. And smoking around your children should be child endangerment.

The things that should be legislated are it's effects on others, but you should be able to whatever you want to yourself.

misspacfic

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surprising!! thanks for looking it up my internet is painfully spotty rn.

totally agree about legislation.

LifeInMultipleChoice

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Well you can throw in the other 800,000 deaths a year caused by the breathing in of car exhaust and you won't be surprised any more. They kill more than just the pedestrians and other drivers.

PrinceWith999Enemies

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As the other user pointed out, cigarettes kill far more Americans than cars or guns. I’m with you on the gun thing. But the car safety stats are always increasing because we do in fact put a huge amount of effort into them - from seat belt laws to firewalls to airbags to automatic braking… there’s too many to name. Now there’s the recent move of making them bigger, harder to stop, and with reduced visibility, so we might see those gains flatten out in the next half decade or so.

We’re also going to start to see a decline in cigarette related deaths as fewer and fewer are smoking them these days. There’s an intersection of public health messaging, government policies on age of access, taxes, and other efforts that are really starting to pay off. I think the e-cigarettes are also helping, but that’s a whole discussion of its own.

So cigarette related deaths are still pretty high, but it will start to fall off. I can’t remember the exact prediction but let’s just call it falling by half in the next decade. Cigarettes are deadly, but they take a long time to kill.

Smokers born in the 40s and 50s are the ones dying from things like cancer and heart disease today, and the replacement rate (new smokers versus loss from people quitting or dying) isn’t working in tobacco’s favor.

Here are some stats.

misspacfic

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i was more referring to pedestrians.

PhlubbaDubba

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Because then concern trolls like you will sealion about why we aren't doing anything about cigarettes instead?

Ever think that those two things kill so much more because anti-smoke laws have been working?

Scubus

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Prepare thy goalpost, because cigarettes kill about 10 times as many as either of the other things

misspacfic

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jesus christ buddy go outside

gamermanh

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Make smokig illegal in public (been done in many places) but legal in your own home, or at places FOR that purpose.

Like alcohol