Realistically, I assume that anyone who wants tobacco and would be affected is just going to buy it outside city limits.
Yep. My hometown restricted beer and wine sales and that is exactly what we did. It was a 15min drive instead of what could have been a 5min drive.
We had a religious township do that, now the highway to the nearest wet town has the highest rate of drunkdriving deaths in the province.
I lived in a dry county growing up. If someone was headed “across the bridge” it meant they were heading to the border of the next county where they had a bar and 4 liquor stores within a half mile stretch.
It’s weird that I grew up in a county that didn’t sell alcohol but there were more liquor stores within 10 miles than there were grocery stores.
Username checks out. Dry/wet town/county lines are a very common experience there
When you’re as drunk and Texan as I am you know where to go to get liquor.
It’s getting less prevalent. Last I heard my hometown is now wet and the closest town down the street serves beer at the only restaurant there. In the last 20 years things have started loosening up a little.
People will drive to county limits, but policies like this have been shown to actually be quite effective. Even if you are willing to drive to a neighboring county, will you do it as often?
No, I’ll just stock up on more at once.
policies like this have been shown to actually be quite effective
United States, 1920s, alcohol.
Very much the opposite
That’s a very different scenario and it required committing crimes to drink. County-level policies like cigarette bans and sugar taxes have legal ways for you to bypass them, but still discourage use.
I understand banning something that’s basically super unhealthy and has direct links to cancer but at the same time, ppl have been smoking and consuming drugs/alcohol for centuries and by stopping ppl from doing it, it’s basically gonna encourage a new generation to try it.
If they’re gonna start banning things like this, then maybe they should also ban alcohol and talcum powder too since they also have links to cancer as well.
Things like this, ppl should be taught about the effects of drugs/cigarettes/alcohol in a safe environment, not just ban things cuz the law says otherwise. You can’t have a black/white approach to those things.
Prohibition has never and will never work, and we have the data to prove it. However, these laws are made by people who want to go and say “I did a thing, re-elect me peasants!”
Is it not just a ban on selling a product? People could grow tobacco, and roll their own.
I didn’t read the law, but from the article it looks like it is just a ban on the sale of the product, not personal choice to actually use tobacco.
Politicians making smoking cool again with this one stupid trick.
Prohibition of cigarettes won’t work, at best people will just go across an imaginary line to buy cigs, at worst it creates an unregulated black market. Just look at how alcohol prohibition went and the current war on drugs is going. If you want to have any sort of meaningful impact on cigarettes create more sin taxes on the product so people will decide on their own to just not buy them.
Prohibition of cigarettes won’t work
I mean, it depends.
Worth noting that a lot of historical “prohibition” efforts have been tools for hyper-policing certain neighborhoods and ethnic groups rather than efforts to actually prohibit the substance.
Re: former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Did the War on Drugs succeed in breaking the back of the Vietnam-Era antiwar movement and the mass incarceration/assassination of 60s/70s era Civil Rights Leaders? Ab-so-fucking-lutely. In that sense, they were enormously successful.
On the flip side, if you look at serious efforts to regulate sale and distribution of controlled substances, there’s some cause for optimism.
Are Dry Counties Safer than Wet Counties?
While dry counties may not be as effective in reducing alcohol-related harms as some people may hope, there is evidence to suggest that other restrictions on alcohol sales may be beneficial. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests limiting the number of days when alcohol can be sold, citing research that suggests that doing so has shown to decrease consumption, alcohol-related violence, and DWIs
Similarly, the CDC also recommends limiting the time in which alcohol can be sold as research has found that increasing the sale of alcohol by two or more hours resulted in increased consumption and motor vehicle crashes.
I should further note that infrastructure improvements, like bus/rail transit and active cab services, do a lot to reduce the negative externalities of excess consumption. Similarly, access to affordable housing and medical services can curb the use of alcohol and heroin as stand-ins for treatment of pain management and depression. And environmental improvements (particularly, de-leading of the water supply and clean-up of toxic dumping sites that contribute to chronic ailments) can reduce demand for pain management drugs at the root.
The idea that you simply can’t do anything about drug abuse and its consequences is heavily predicated on the assumption that our Drug Wars have sincerely sought to improve the lives of residents. When policymakers are allowed to pursue reforms that include public services and societal improvements, municipalities report significantly better results than when they’re restricted purely to policing and other punitive measures.
Sounds like you would appreciate The End of Policing. It more or less advances that public services (socialism) would be more effective at addressing societal ills. I agree.
Sounds like you would appreciate The End of Policing.
A copy is sitting on my bookshelf.
I’ll buy you a beer when we cross paths.
In Australia there’s already huge issues with a black market and criminal gangs, and that’s just with cigarettes being super expensive (like $50+ for a pack).
I think governments should really think about making sure their policies don’t backfire, and keeping legal, affordable supply should be part of that.
Although to be fair, the tax on cigarettes does tend to work, Australians generally don’t smoke, if you see someone smoking they’re usually a recent immigrant or just old.
In Australia there’s already huge issues with a black market and criminal gangs
If you dig into the history of drug/alcohol smuggling in the US, a lot of what you come back to is one branch of the US government doing the enforcement and another branch using black market trade as an illicit money laundering / revenue scheme. I would not be shocked to discover that a bunch of that Australian black market activity is a feature of prohibition rather than a bug. But again, that goes back to the real goals of prohibition. Is this an effort to curb cigarette consumption or just a means of implementing a shake-down of retail consumers?
I think governments should really think about making sure their policies don’t backfire
They have. And gallons of ink have been spilled illustrating why certain policies are more successful than others.
But there’s different measures of success. Again, to go back to Nixon, the goal of nationally prohibiting weed consumption wasn’t to keep people from ingesting THC. It was to target sections of the college youth and antiwar movements who preferred weed over booze. In that sense, the policies didn’t backfire. They functioned exactly as designed.
the tax on cigarettes does tend to work, Australians generally don’t smoke, if you see someone smoking they’re usually a recent immigrant or just old.
There was a big rash of Boomer-era cigarette deaths that left a serious psychic wound in the GenX / Millennial generation. I grew up watching older family members suffer and die from lung cancer. It heavily influenced more proclivity to smoke. And I’ve got more than a few peers who could say the same.
But Zoomers/Alphas have “vaping” now, plus an abundance of marketing and propaganda intended to tell them that this kind of nicotine consumption is actually harmless. They didn’t grow up watching older family members huddling over oxygen masks and spitting up black snot all day and dying in their mid-50s to three-pack-a-day habits.
I think living through that shit has incentivized the idea of cigarette taxes as a remedy. But its the drop in consumption that made taxation possible in a way that - say - a higher gasoline tax to fight climate change or a higher income tax rate to fund universal Medicare/caid isn’t.
If you ban tabacco all out its going to create a huge black market. Addicted smokers that don’t want to stop aren’t just going to stop.
But, raising the legal smoking age with one year every year might work. Tabacco use is already pretty low for GenZ as smoking isn’t “cool” like it was in the 70s.
Prohibition of cigarettes won’t work[:] at best people will just go across an imaginary line to buy cigs, [and] at worst it creates an unregulated black market.
Oh, I think it does worse than create an underground market.
But millennials won’t get tobacco HERE. Soon, maybe the next town will decide they won’t get them THERE. Think globally, act locally.
Seriously this will make cigarettes look cool and rebellious again to young kids, and guess who will have cigarettes? The same person who sells other illegal substances. Poof, you have now made cigarettes a gateway to cocaine, meth, heroine, and none of it is regulated so deaths from fentanyl just with have easier access to our youth.
Harm reduction is a thing. The law will mean that fewer people will start smoking. If fewer people smoke, fewer people will wind up in the hospital with lung cancer, meaning less money needs to be spent on healthcare and less crippling medical debt. Arguing against creating a law because “criminals gon criminal” is a non-starter.
There already is a tobacco black market anyway.
I smoked the most before I was legally allowed to do it
Congrats on cutting back. That shit is terrible for you.
i quit when I started running it was automatic
I can definitely see how those two things would conflict.
Smoking is not good for your health, but we as Americans are free to make that choice for ourselves. I think that’s the definition of unconstitutional. Banning something like that is only going to make it more widespread and sketchy. Look at the war on drugs and what it’s done, but sure it’ll work this time.
I don’t think “unconstitutional” is the word you want here. There’s endless things you are not free to purchase or choose for yourself.
“Unconstitutional” == I don’t like it
Literally as deep as most people’s understanding goes.
It’s more like unconstitutional == government overreach
Also what language do you code in?
Not going to argue about whether or not it’s constitutional (because I don’t know), but I just wanted to point out that this case is slightly more complicated than just “you’re not allowed to purchase”. It’s “you’re not allowed to purchase… BUT other people are”. Which means it’s potentially a question of discrimination, which is maybe not as cut-and-dry as a “normal” law banning a substance across the board.
The cost of cigs is also artificially inflated in many places. I’m glad to see less of the younger crowd smoking, that’s a good thing. But doing it in these ways just feels plain un-American.
We let an awful lot of things that are bad for us slide, because the effects aren’t as visible.
Back to the old days of buying smokes out of some guy’s trunk.
Thank god i can gi back to buying individual smokes when i am hammered at the bar. Nothing worse than smoking a pack of cigarettes over the course of a week because i had a craving while drunk.
Honestly tho yeah, just look at prohibition.
That’s what I mean. As someone else pointed out, all it does is make it inconvenient, and it opens up a black market. People are gonna do what they want. Either this means they’ll just drive to another city/county/state, or someone is going to acquire them in bulk and sell them on black alleys.
In my mind, a more effective approach is to regulate where someone can smoke. There are a number of CA cities where it’s effectively illegal to smoke a cigarette within city limits (aside from private property), which drives smokers into little nooks and crannies. Ultimately most people want it out of sight and out of mind, and to not walk into a cloud of it on a sidewalk or have their children seeing/smelling it, which is 100% reasonable. But telling someone they’re not allowed to buy it is going to incentivize some to seek it out more.
I wish them luck with that. If someone wants cigarettes they’ll get cigarettes. I bought them under age and when they were over $6 in my city I’d buy them in other states or duty free or the black market.
I grew up with these types of laws and they are just more of an inconvenience than anything else. My old hometown restricted the sale of beer and wine for many years, but it was easy enough just to go to the next town over. (Simultaneously, the town hosted a state managed liquor store which was extremely weird.)
If smaller communities want to restrict products like that, whatever. Hell, even restricting some services is OK as long as it’s not discrimination based.
Personally, I wouldn’t live in one of those places. It’s not about the tobacco but more about the people who are elected by those communities to make laws like that. If smaller communities of like-minded people want to make their own laws like that, so be it. I wouldn’t be like-minded, in that case.
Good ol’ Brookline. Bunch of donkeys.
Sad.
Let people put in their bodies what they want.
Really telling how hypocritical most people are. They only support legalizing the drugs they use, and are completely cool with vilifying those who use different drugs.
Let people put in their bodies what they want.
In countries where we all bear and share the cost of healthcare, this is a different issue. Please don’t say you’re such a big fan of self-harm.
But this is also an article about Massachusetts…
… where Romney introduced mass health for everyone
If you consider that healthcare for everyone, then America as a whole bears and shares the cost of healthcare for everyone because of Obamacare?
I mean it does already when people use ERs as primary care offices and we neglect preventative care until you show up to the hospital with some catastrophic problem we have to legally take care of because of EMTALA
Good.
Please for the love of God watch this before commenting some dumb shit about “it’s my right to expose everyone around me to airborne toxic materials!”
yeah, being exposed to cigarette smoke is not ideal.
my issue with this law is that it feels immensely inconsistent: cars, and guns kill a huge amount of people per year. likely more than cigarettes, but i can’t verify that rn. why not put some effort into those problems?
Cigarettes are responsible for about 480,000 deaths per year. Guns related deaths make up just over 48,000. And about 42,000 for vehicle related deaths.
Honestly, I’m quite surprised, I would’ve guessed that you were correct.
Edit: there is a huge difference though. Most cigarette smokers are self inflicted. As far as second hand smoke, if you can prove damages as a result of it I’m fairly certain you could sue. Enough of that would discourage people from smoking around others without consent. And smoking around your children should be child endangerment.
The things that should be legislated are it’s effects on others, but you should be able to whatever you want to yourself.
surprising!! thanks for looking it up my internet is painfully spotty rn.
totally agree about legislation.
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As the other user pointed out, cigarettes kill far more Americans than cars or guns. I’m with you on the gun thing. But the car safety stats are always increasing because we do in fact put a huge amount of effort into them - from seat belt laws to firewalls to airbags to automatic braking… there’s too many to name. Now there’s the recent move of making them bigger, harder to stop, and with reduced visibility, so we might see those gains flatten out in the next half decade or so.
We’re also going to start to see a decline in cigarette related deaths as fewer and fewer are smoking them these days. There’s an intersection of public health messaging, government policies on age of access, taxes, and other efforts that are really starting to pay off. I think the e-cigarettes are also helping, but that’s a whole discussion of its own.
So cigarette related deaths are still pretty high, but it will start to fall off. I can’t remember the exact prediction but let’s just call it falling by half in the next decade. Cigarettes are deadly, but they take a long time to kill.
Smokers born in the 40s and 50s are the ones dying from things like cancer and heart disease today, and the replacement rate (new smokers versus loss from people quitting or dying) isn’t working in tobacco’s favor.
i was more referring to pedestrians.
Because then concern trolls like you will sealion about why we aren’t doing anything about cigarettes instead?
Ever think that those two things kill so much more because anti-smoke laws have been working?
jesus christ buddy go outside
Prepare thy goalpost, because cigarettes kill about 10 times as many as either of the other things
Make smokig illegal in public (been done in many places) but legal in your own home, or at places FOR that purpose.
Like alcohol
