Ban smoking for those born after 2000 - what do you think?

[funambulist]

www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/23/doctors-vote-cigarette-sale-ban-children-born-2000

I hope I've managed to do the link properly.

Tomorrow, the British Medical Association are having a vote on whether push for a permanent ban on the sale of cigarettes to those born after 2000. Those born in 2000 are 12 or 13 years old now, so, hopefully, not yet smoking. Is this a good way of ensuring that they never take it up and thus preventing the health consequences for the next generation?

I don't think this can be done within the current legal framework of the uk!

Alcohol and cigarettes are as bad as one another.

I wouldn't want my child forced onto E-cigs when the long term health risks from them are an unknown.

Banning it will not do anything to curb its usage, just look at the amount of smokers who started under age anyway

No, sorry. If cigarettes are legal for adults to buy then that applies to all adults. In 2018 you can't have two tiers of adults, one who is allowed to buy legal cigarettes and one who isn't. It's absurd.
Smoking is gross and measures must be taken to reduce uptake but this is stupid.

Ban smoking in the UK, ban sale of cigarettes, fine the litter louts who drop fag ends on the ground, charge smokers for all medical treatment associated with smoking for EVERYBODY. Don't understand why government still allows sale if such a dangerous drug.

And I would support a similar ban on all forms of alcoholic drink too. Drinking kills, smoking kills.

Would the simplest way to get round discrimination be just to keep raising the age limit. So now it;s 18 next year 19 then 20 and so on. So kids born in 2014 would end up being 36 or something before they could buy cigarettes.

Alcohol is no different to smoking. In many ways it's worse because it has that (false) patina of acceptability bestowed on it by the way people have been socialised (by Big Alcohol and its political lapdogs) over the years. Also of course while many smokers accept that smoking isn't desirable almost all drinkers get ridiculously defensive when drinking is criticised. Which indicates a deeper malaise.

No, because 36 is an adult, and 35 is equally an adult. You can't just pick an age and pass a law. People wouldn't stand for it. I wouldn't agree to the precedent setting a law like that would set, even though I wish smoking was completely banned.

Umm that is what happened with smoking.
It used to be 16 and now it's 18.

Surely we should first enforce the law we already have, banning the sale of cigarettes to under 18s. That would solve 2/3 of the problem.

Herc I think the problem for most drinkers is that it's a commonly used tactic by the pro-smoking lobby, and blunts the issue re tobacco.

It is possible to drink alcohol and have no health issues as a result. That's not the same as smoking.

I agree problem drinking is a big issue, but there is a big difference between 'some alcohol' and 'problem drinking' , whereas there isn't any gap between 'smoking' and 'problem smoking'. So the two are not analogous.

And as soon as people start mixing 'ban alcohol' message in with the anti-smoking messages, they lose a huge amount of credibility, because of the differences between the two things.

as long as the over 80's are never banned from ciggies as that's when I plan to go back on them

They lose credibility with drinkers. Drink is a much bigger social problem than smoking, a bigger health problem, and it contributes less to the tax take.

I've never heard of someone being beaten up because their attacker had had a fag or two. Ive never had a problem with louts committing acts of vandalism in my room because they were acting under the influence of tobacco. And so on.

Road. Not room. The only acts of vandalism that have been committed in my room were associated with kids jumping on the bed (which broke). :(

is that really true AMIS?

I would've thought it could be possible to smoke 1/2 cigs a day for years and suffer no ill effect, similar to drinking 1/2 units of alcohol. ( No guarantees of course ) But the problem was keeping it to a very low safe level given the highly addictive nature of cigs

Moving the age from 16 to 18 was simply correcting an anomaly. 18 is the age of adulthood.

HercShipwright I'm not sure that alcohol is a bigger health problem than smoking. Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the UK, killing more people than obesity, alcohol, road traffic accidents, illegal drugs and HIV combined.

I do agree that alcohol causes huge social problems though.

Just because there is a bigger problem with drinking doesn't mean you don't tackle other issues in other areas.

We need to tackle smoking, obesity and drinking

probably starting with the least first maybe sensible and then work out how to tackle the bigger issues

7Days I don't think that there is a safe level of cigarette smoking as different people are at more or less risk of developing cancer due to genetic factors.

there may not be a blanket 'authorised' safe level, but I would've thought the same goes for alcohol and other substances.

Banning alcohol has been tried. It resulted in the biggest boon for organised crime ever.

And was also ineffectual.

That is one of the most ridiculous ideas I've heard for a long time. All it will do is see more people with a criminal record as tobacco will become like canabis and will take up even more police time on something that will be legal for a huge proportion of the population for 60+ years.

If this an the proposed sugar tax (another daft idea) is brought in what will be next? Abolish all shops and have all meals delivered once a week that are decided for us with no sugar, sweeteners, low fat, low carb, dairy free, salt free and have only water from the tap to drink?

Excellent idea. No idea how it could be enforced or policed though.

Speakeasies and nicotine dens!

That was just a general comment, not in response to Meglet.