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Rishi Sunak considers banning cigarettes for next generation (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/worldnews@lemmy.ml
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Rishi Sunak is considering introducing some of the world’s toughest anti-smoking measures that would in effect ban the next generation from ever being able to buy cigarettes, the Guardian has learned.

Whitehall sources said the prime minister was looking at measures similar to those brought in by New Zealand last December. They involved steadily increasing the legal smoking age so tobacco would end up never being sold to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009.

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[–] 6 points 3 years ago (3 children)

This doesn't matter. The question is whether a ban constitutes a greater social harm than legalisation. The fact that people can evade the ban doesn't matter, after all murder is illegal but people still do it (at a much lower rate).

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    Yea the one reason I'm against flat out legalization of every drug (only wanting decriminalization) is because people who shouldn't have access to the drug would have significantly easier access to the drug (just having someone buy it for them). Primarily kids, since they practically constantly do that with cigarettes and alcohol and have started especially doing it recently with vapes and weed as weed has become less and less banned. I'm pretty confident a majority of high schoolers vape and that's because they're very easy to legally get and therefore they usually have someone buy them for them, and also a lot just get sold vapes by the vendors anyways and neither the vendor nor the buyer really stand a chance of getting caught just because of how little you can do to actually control that (without relying on a bunch of kids just going and telling cops "this place sold us vapes")

    Kids obviously aren't immune to doing crack or heroin now but if it were just legalized it'd make sense that the amount of them abusing it illegally would become wayyyy higher. And that really IS a (big) problem, unlike shit like books that don't follow a certain agenda or drag queen story hour. It could screw up a large portion of the population for their young life. Best you could do to prevent such effects is teach how to be safe with drugs and how to prevent/reduce certain bad things from happening (already good idea anyways), and to implement draconian (and expensive & time/resource consuming) measures that would make monitoring all the children & drug stores extremely closely at almost all times a possibility so you could nip the bud of any absurdities like adults giving/selling drugs to students early on.

    I see just decriminalization as not much of a risk because you aren't basically enabling businesses everywhere to (legally) sell these drugs, which would generally make it more accessible to kids, you're just making it so doing drugs won't get you fucked by the authorities and destroy your life in an unnecessary way through prison "rehabilitation" (slavery aimed not to rehabilitate but just to make money off the prisoners with little regard for their rehabilitation or their life), or just getting shot/falsely arrested by cops, or maybe stopping false searches too.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 years ago

    I agree to a point. However I think that decriminalisation fails to recognise that drug courts are quite effective at rehabilitation. It's important to minimise the effects of imprisonment and criminal record for drug offences that way individuals always have an opportunity to higher income careers. (Although from my experience, competitive jobs markets ignore drug felonies and sometimes even violent felonies). The solution isn't to completely defang the state and just hope that people decide to quit drugs while dealing with all the problems they cause along the way. States need to have some ability to pressure individuals to rehabilitation.

    The latter part of your comment is just leftist conspiracism. The percentage of false arrests is heavily out weighed by guilty parties getting away. You can easily find this by both reading papers on it or just going to your local homeless shelter and talking to people. An encounter with police is much more likely to involve you getting away with a crime than falsely accused.

    Prison labor is also not profitable, the majority of prisons are publicly run. The idea that high incarceration rates are because the state somehow makes money by enslaving people is completely false.

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