A Massachusetts town that adopted an unusual ordinance banning the sale of tobacco to anyone born in the 21st century is being looked at as a possible model for other cities and towns hoping to further clamp down on cigarettes and other tobacco products.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
A copy is sitting on my bookshelf.
I’ll buy you a beer when we cross paths.
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.
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.