New Zealand imposes lifetime ban on youth buying cigarettes

https://apnews.com/article/health-new-zealand-smoking-government-727543fbb8ea3f905f6bb08bb05c4033

by geox • 4 years ago

19 20 4 years ago

apnews.com

2Gkashmiri• 4 years ago

here me out. this needs to be replicated around the world.

nix232• 4 years ago

And the same with marijuana, sugar, citric acid in drinks and alcohol....right?

Then next barbecue because of the carcinogens, and making fire overall (tar).

markeibes• 4 years ago

Sugar and citric acid are fine. If you consume them you don't impact me. Or only very indirectly.

Tarucho• 4 years ago

Marijuana lobbists 1 vs Tobacco lobbists 0. Health be damned (in either case)

michaelmrose• 4 years ago

This can be consumed in edibles which doesn't involve breathing in smoke at all and even smoking marijuana involves far less risks. People after all don't normally smoke 40 or 50 joints a day.

TillE• 4 years ago

I'm continually astonished at how many people are still smoking either cannabis or tobacco. Especially with nicotine, the advantages are endless: cheaper, healthier, no awful smell.

Admittedly, weed vapes are a tougher issue because of the higher temperatures required. They're fairly expensive. But yeah, edibles are really popular.

lern_too_spel2• 4 years ago

Marijuana is illegal in New Zealand. https://www.police.govt.nz/advice-services/drugs-and-alcohol...

LocalH2• 4 years ago

At some point, free adults must not be prevented from taking actions that could potentially harm them (either in the short or long term). How far down that slope do we go? We worry about tobacco, when we allow megaconglomerates to fill the market full of heavily processed food? How far are we going to allow governments to tell us "you can't do this because it might/will hurt you, so we are making that decision for you".

This is also basically enshrined age discrimination, at least during the long transition period where everyone born before the threshold date is dying off.

seanw444• 4 years ago

Welcome to the age of legislating and enforcing everything.

This is why I think congress / parliament, in its current form, is a flawed model. It incentivizes members to be constantly legislating. We don't need legislation day in and day out. Otherwise we end up with too many unnecessarily bloated laws, just for the sake of supposedly "making society more safe and efficient."

The strive by most today is to remove personal choice to ensure "peace and safety." Coincidentally, that's also the phrase used by many dictators.

Unfortunately there's nowhere else for people like me to run. Seems most people want safety at the cost of liberty. I lean the other way. And that used to be a popular opinion.

LocalH2• 4 years ago

The same flaw that afflicts much of the rest of society. Nobody can ever be content with maintaining, there always has to be "growth" or "improvement". There is a misguided perception that doing "nothing" is not a good thing, even if "nothing" needs to be done. Capitalism, as practiced worldwide, is infested with this. Annual profits must increase, and not plateau.

MWil• 4 years ago

Less of a flaw in how Congress / Parliament is formed, more of a flaw in how laws don't require a sunset provision, or absent one operate on a default 15-20 year maximum

We know murder should always be illegal - it should be noncontroversial to modify a 15-20 yr default sunset to "500 years" and call it a day

Some form of cryptocurrency legislation should probably be treated more like a "well this is new territory" so move the date up and punt it to a future Congress to renew based on how good of a result was able to be achieved

mattpallissard2• 4 years ago

How far are we going to allow governments to tell us "you can't do this because it might/will hurt you, so we are making that decision for you".

I'm not a fan of laws that make something illegal without an injured party.

I'm also puzzled my social circle who want to outlaw cigarettes but legalize all manner of recreational drugs. I've had neighbors who smoke cigarettes and neighbors who are tweakers. It was quite obvious which group was worse for the wear and worse for the neighborhood.

EdwardDiego3• 4 years ago

without an injured party.

I'd argue that premature death leaves your whānau/family an injured party.

(I would say "and the health system", but then I read an paper which concluded that smokers and their propensity to die younger is actually saving the health system a lot of money, as the longer you live, the more healthcare you need.)

lern_too_spel2• 4 years ago

At some point, civics education is going to have to improve to the point where people stop thinking that personal freedom is the axiom on which societies should be built. Otherwise, we'll live with tragedy of the commons and related market failures until somebody exercises their personal freedom to kill all of humanity.

EdwardDiego3• 4 years ago

Smoking has significant health impacts at a societal level, in NZ, especially in the poorest. Even at the basic level, dying prematurely will cause suffering to your family.

And you'll still be allowed to grow your own tobacco, if you're dedicated.

EdwardDiego3• 4 years ago

This doesn't really change that much, our government has greatly minimised smoking by increasing the excise tax on tobacco by a large amount annually.

Every time the tax increase kicked in, the number of people accessing funded support for quitting spikes.

The Ministry of Health even encourages smokers to switch to vaping, which I thought is rather pragmatic in an age where people in NZ treat vaping as equivalent to smoking in terms of unpleasantness and the correspondingly expected politeness - don't vape near children, ensure your vapour doesn't blow onto other people, only vape outside, and even then, many outside areas in a hospitality business are designated smoking/vaping free.

Very few young people are taking up cigarettes, I have four teenaged sons, and in all their friendship circles, there's a total of two smokers. But, that leads me to our current problem is, we kinda screwed the pooch on how vaping entered the market, and how it was/wasn't regulated, and that's what all the cool kids are getting addicted to these days instead of ciggies.

So yeah. This policy won't change much, as the existing mechanisms have been rather effective.

New Zealand imposes lifetime ban on youth buying cigarettes

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