Smoking ban

We will end up with a situation where a 90 year old might be going out in a snow storm to buy their fags because a willing child or grandchild isn't old enough.

I doubt many smokers live to 90, but if they do so and insist on going out in a snowstorm, then that's their decision. No one's fault but their own.

Surely smokers are to blame if they suffer smoking-related health problems, though? Yes, tobacco companies are scum, but smokers are responsible for their own actions. Health warnings on cigarette packets have been legally required since 1971. In fact, there are newspaper reports from the 1950s about the link between smoking and lung cancer. The vast majority of smokers alive today made a conscious decision to start smoking in the knowledge that it was highly addictive and dangerous. If you're old enough to read, you're old enough to know that buying/using something with "warning: this may kill you" written on the side is a very, very stupid decision.

I never implied you could end up banning everything. My concern is this could lead to other bans that we might not be so happy about.

No positives at all.
Smoking - shortens lives, causes numerous illnesses, exacerbates existing illnesses, wrecks skin and causes premature aging, reduces fertility, offends other people, harms the environment, is totally unethical as tobacco pickers are exploited and more. Just nothing good about it. It's such a no brainer that it needs banning, one way or another.

Re your description of tobacco moguls as scum. Correct. Scum is right. They've started pushing smoking on young vulnerable people in the developing world now, knowing they're losing the western market. How vile is that? As if these countries don't have enough issues already, without their population being hooked on an expensive destructive habit!
Such a morally bankrupt way to make a living, or make a fortune, as they have...

None of the things you have mentioned will be policed because none of them are unlawful.

This is a law that affects traders, no-one else. The behaviour of traders will be policed, no-one else.

Yes, it makes me so mad to think of these predatory people, relying on young people choosing a pathway of poor health and early death so that they can live a life of luxury. Scum.

I'm sure they'd like to spin a yarn that they 'only' seek to target older people who have made the free mature decision to smoke, and that they are just trying to persuade them to switch from a competitor's brand to their own; but we all know that their continued survival depends heavily on all of the kids behind the bike sheds succumbing to peer pressure and making a terrible choice as juveniles that will plague and shorten their whole lives.

It would be so easy for them to have been (slightly) more responsible and target adverts at teenagers saying "Hey, Kids - smoking is an ADULT choice, and very dangerous, so you really MUST not think about doing it until you're old enough to properly weigh up all the negatives and make that informed decision; if you're in any doubts, you should talk to your parents about it" - in the same way that alcohol and even gambling companies (eugh) advertise to caution restraint. For some reason, they never seem to do this.

I was going to say 'weigh up the negatives and the positives', but I don't think there really are any positives, are there?

How many people do you know who have takeaways or do risky sports, who keep telling you how much they wish they had never started doing so, and warn younger people never to do the same as them, but find themselves summarily unable to stop doing it, however desperate they may be to stop?

Also, a takeaway is just food. Maybe not the healthiest food choice, but as part of a balanced diet, it will usually contain some nutrition and energy to keep you alive - as we all need on a very regular basis. Smoking has no health benefits whatsoever and will very likely affect your health negatively before killing you much earlier than you would otherwise have died.

I agree with you about being on the watch for governments looking to take our freedoms away; but I don't see how you can reconcile it by saying that you should never ban anything, just in case you could end up banning everything.

Nobody is saying that there wouldn't be ways around it, but the intention is there for things to (albeit slowly) head in one direction - and for the law to officially signal a stand against tobacco.

Yes, people who are just too young to buy them themselves will now have friends/spouses/partners who can get them for them - but this won't be the case forever. In decades to come, I can't imagine people wanting to marry somebody 30 years older than them, just so their spouse can buy them fags!

I would support a total ban on smoking in public but this proposed law seems both nonsensical and illiberal to me.
As PPs have said the reality is that it will be ridiculously difficult to police — (someone else, spouse/partner/sibling/friends) will buy your cigs for you, or you can go abroad, buy duty free or even duty paid tobacco - no-one in, say France, is going to ask a 50-year old Brit for ID to comply with a law that does not apply there.
It is probably true that social attitudes towards smoking will change, as they did towards drink driving, but there are better ways to encourage this than prohibitions which will bring serious problems, not least criminal involvement.

I’m not a smoker and do not like the smell but what worries me is if the government do this what next will they stop us doing or consuming because it’s unhealthy/harmful for us? Risky sports? Takeaways? Alcohol?
Too much power to too few people.

@SeanBeansMealDeal you make lots of good points.
I actually think the public would be largely on board. Apart from the smokers and a few right-wing libertarians who bang on about freedom, only when it suits them!
I love your idea of transferring the bill back to the tobacco companies. I honestly don't know how the CEOs of those companies sleep at night.
My cousin's DC went to nursery with kids whose mum always turned up in the fanciest car, dressed in the poshest clothes, living in the poshest neighborhood etc. My cousin wondered how they were so wealthy, and then discovered the mum was married to someone near the top of tobacco industry. Blood money. Utterly foul 😡

@Gorgonemilezola it doesn't suggest anything of the sort. Young people are allowed to drink/smoke/vape - there is no law against them doing so (well, they can't drink under the age of 5). The laws prohibit selling not consuming - and these are enforced by Trading Standards. Of course there are traders who break the law, but that doesn't mean it is bad law.

But that would suggest underage people don't drink/smoke/vape now, which is obviously not the case.

Homosexuals were chemically castrated because they were considered to be mentally ill and morally deficient and homosexual acts were considered to be abhorrent.

This was NEVER dressed up as a public health measure and you are utterly wrong to have posted this frankly moronic and deeply offensive analogy. The only people who chemically castrated homosexuals "for the good of society" were the fucking Nazis. You've just compared public health legislation to the Holocaust. Go you.

@SeanBeansMealDeal
Yes, it seems to have been a gradual awakening. But public messages about the dangers mostly seemed to start emerging in the early 1960s. This is a very interesting read -
https://ash.org.uk/about/who-we-are/our-history

Seriously???!!! How can you possibly compare those things?
Totally different. We KNOW without question, that smoking is a killer. There's no ambiguity. To compare banning smoking with the cruel treatment of gay men at a time of great ignorance, is pretty obscene.

It would be enforced by trading standard, just as underage alcohol and tobacco sales are now. If a trader isn't checking IDs when they sell tobacco products, then they stand to lose their premises licence. It's really not that complicated.

There is no age limit on smoking and this new legislation doesn't propose one. It's purely on the sale of tobacco products (including proxy sales).

I think, as a general rule, giving the state power over people "in the interests of health" isn't a great idea.

"Health" is a very flexible word. Remember when it was "unhealthy" to be gay ? To the extent people were chemically castrated (for the good of society as well as their own good, of course).

Genuine question, though: would they have known how bad they were for you? Might they have known that they were not a particularly wise healthy choice - like bacon, UPFs and high-sugar diets nowadays - but not really appreciated the full horror of them?

After all, didn't a lot of doctors actively promote them to people as a way to calm their nerves? I may be misremembering here, but I also recall hearing them recommended to people with asthma as being good for 'exercising' their lungs?!

I'm not saying that anybody on this thread has said that, but I'm just anticipating how I think a lot of the general public would react.

I agree with you that an instant ban would be best of all, with help for people to stop, but I just can't see how that would be in any way practical.

Cold turkey treatment would be an enormous hit to the NHS all at once, and how would the economy and society be affected if everybody who smokes is suddenly taken out of the workforce for however long it takes them to get clean?

Then again, maybe all of the enormous costs for this could be forcibly transferred back to the immensely wealthy death-merchant tobacco manufacturers who have got fat from people's misery for so long, so I suppose it's not impossible.

I must admit even I didn't know it was known that far back. Thank you for sharing this.

TryingToSeeTheFunnySide, absolutely. DDad was born in the 1920s. Woodbine were known as 'coffin nails' when he was a lad, so the dangers have been known about for decades. Anyone under the age of 85 who claims to not have known smoking is bad for you is having a laugh.

Just have to say, much as I feel sorry for anyone who is a slave to their habit; smokers aren't really the victims here are they. Well, maybe those who started before the risks were known. They are. But, there are ever fewer of those left. Most smokers did know the risks when they started. The risks have been known for decades
The victims, are, the innocents who have to breathe in others' smoke. Kids living in households with smokers, who could be left with lifelong respiratory issues. Asthmatics forced to wait at bus stops surrounded by a cloud of smoke. Grieving loved ones whose family members' lives were cut short due to cancer, COPD or other illnesses. These are the victims.
Smokers really do need to take full responsibility for the misery they cause others. There's masses of help nowadays to give up. No excuses anymore really.

I don't think anyone is suggesting just a blanket ban without backup, or grannies being 'cruelly deprived of their last pleasure ' or whatever. I've read the whole thread, and can't see anyone suggesting that.
I personally do think a total ban is appropriate. But, obviously support for existing smokers. Not sure how it would work? Maybe an allowance from the NHS, like heroine addicts get. Obviously it'd be terrible to expect smokers to go cold turkey; but the point is to remove them from shops, so nobody 'new' can buy them. Smokers shouldn't have to go cold turkey; but the nasty tobacco companies who profit, most definitely should. Dry their profits up asap.

Foul habit, but they can't police the rules around smoking/vaping currently in place so wouldn't expect more from new laws. We have laws in place to cover pretty much every aspect of behaviour that makes people's lives a misery, but if they're never policed, if there are never any consequences, what's the point.