Plans to stop young people born since 2009 ever smoking are being debated and will be voted on later.
Rishi Sunak’s bill aims to create the UK’s first smoke-free generation in a major public health intervention.
The Tobacco and Vapes Bill would ensure anyone turning 15 from this year would be banned from buying cigarettes, and also aims to make vapes less appealing to children.
A number of Tory MPs have told the BBC they won’t back the bill.
The BBC understands that Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch is considering voting against the plans.
I’m all about personal choice and laws like this conflict me.
Same. Normally I’d say “keep it legal” but smoking has significant second-hand effects, unlike something like motorcycle helmets for example (which I do not think should be legally mandated). I’m very torn on this one.
I find the second hand effects argument a difficult one to swallow when we deal with car pollution, industrial waste, microplastics, and so much more on a minute to minute basis. Anyone who lives in a city has essentially no reasonable expectation of overly clean air.
Public spaces are just that—public—and there should not be an expectation of being insulated from every harmful output by your fellow citizens, within reason. I’d take the errant cigarette waft over a bus station fart any day.
I’d support banning or heavily penalizing those things too, FWIW.
Don’t get me wrong, I want a clean world too, but what replaces the things we ban? Do we go back to horses (and all the animal cruelty that includes), or does someone foot the bill for everyone to get electric vehicles with charging stations that are 100% renewable?
Same with cigarettes—I’m ok with banning them in a world with free mental healthcare, humane working conditions, and stress relief spaces on every public block. Since that isn’t the world we live in though…I’m going to continue to defend people’s ability to reduce their stress with 5 minutes of nicotine, even if it is at the detriment of their own health. Some lives are so hard that extending them isn’t desirable—so the goal becomes to make the best of the time you have.
Seems silly to restrict or punish people for that reality, especially when nothing is being done to address the root causes of why people want to smoke in the first place.
‘Everyone else is hurting you, so it should be okay for me to hurt you, too!’
It’s 2024, and there are people who unironically think that two wrongs make a right.
The damage done by secondhand smoking is not an argument, it’s a proven fact. It has been for decades.
You think that air can be too clean?
This reminds me of how smokers will try to exercise, start coughing because their lungs are clogged and trying to process the increase in oxygen, then using that to claim that exercise is bad for you.
As a motorcycle rider: not wearing your helmet has significant second-hand effects on those who see your brains smeared across the highway.
You’re also far more likely to take a rock to the face and become a danger to those around you before you crash without a helmet.
In other words: it’s not just a personal choice and absolutely should be legally mandated
I don’t see any benefits to smoking but we can say that about many things. I’d like to live in a smoke free world but once we go down the path, we run into the issue where to start banning everything on health concerns.
I like being able to go out to eat and it be smoke free but I wish the market had decided that.
Not really. Soda for example doesn’t harm others, regardless of how much you drink. Smoking is different.
If you’re smoking by yourself, you are not impacting anyone. In the United States, it’s banned indoors almost everywhere. The main impact is to the user.
Smokers are some of the nastiest people when it comes to littering.
Smokers litter!
Great now that we have established this fact of life, force tobacco corporations to make cigarette butts biodegrade at a faster rate.
I just don’t get that.
When I was young I would just toss them out the window, but as I got older I realized how fucked up that was.
It doesn’t take long to just stick the butt out the window and let the cherry burn off, then you can trash it in the car without the smell
Lots of smokers do so around their kids. How do you police that?
I dunno.
It’s illegal to jack off in front of your kids.
Why don’t we make it illegal to smoke in the same house as them, too?
Both seem equally-difficult to police.
Excellent analogy - you’re right.
Then you have the “parents” who purposely blow smoke in their baby’s face so the baby develops asthma and they can get government money for the baby from disability.
Guys, we found where Reagan’s zombie is hiding again. You need to stop doing that and go back to your grave, Mr. President.
Show me proof
Ah yes the best way to make money: have kids.
You’re delusional man, me too thanks.
The best way to get free money from the government, that is.
ya and there are literally millions of welfare queens who use there babies like gasoline mules, like they sifone gasoline out of cars in a parking lot and then they have the baby’s drink it and then go home and when the baby’s pee they have free gasoline
its out of control
You make fun of things that actually happen because you don’t want to believe that they happen. Not all children have happy childhoods.
Children are sometimes born to people who abuse and neglect them. It’s reality, not something to make fun of.
It hurts if you throw the can hard enough. /s
If you ride without a helmet, you’re too dumb to get a licence
I agree that it’s incredibly stupid, but if being stupid were illegal, we’d have an awful lot of people in prison.
I smoke a lot. It’s basically the only vice I can do anymore, so I enjoy it.
I wouldn’t want anyone else to take it up though.
Then get off your ass and mentor some youths.
Why would I do something you want to do? I never once said anything about mentoring anyone.
Even motorcycle helmets have a significant secondary psychological impact for bystanders… The difference between seeing someone slide and seeing a human crayon go splat is huge.
I don’t like these laws.
If you’re going to ban it, ban it from being sold on the grounds that it poses a danger to the buyer.
If someone wants to grow their own, they should be allowed to do whatever they want with it, except sell it.
It’s a drug ban. I am not conflicted. It will go the way of alcohol, weed and every other illegal drug.
We’ve been able to effectively curtail tobacco use by regulating the shit out of it.
Yes and no. Drugs, okay, but not ones which so negatively affect those around users.
So everything legal, just no public use?
That would be a very reasonable solution. Like not being allowed to drink in public. And drinking doesn’t even have secondhand effects …unless a drunk fall on top of you.
Private use still affects others such as the family members.
But there is no guarantee of family being around. Hell I know someone who only smokes before a hunt, mind you its with a pipe and is a family tradition of his but its still smoking. Him smoking in the middle of the woods aint hurten no one.
Not sure what your point is. People do smoke in their homes with family around, and in their cars. This should protect them.
Vaping doesn’t really. I mean, the user’s still got a nicotine addiction, but there isn’t a sidestream smoke issue.
Indeed.