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For me it’s about personal choice. I don’t want to prevent someone from enjoying something as long as they know the consequences and have the mental capacity t
by parsimo2010 7y ago
For me it’s about personal choice. I don’t want to prevent someone from enjoying something as long as they know the consequences and have the mental capacity to make their own choices.
Courts have long held (in multiple countries) that average teenagers are not responsible enough to make certain decisions and need to be protected until they are more mature. That’s the basic reasoning behind my opinion to not outlaw outright, but to at least not target vulnerable populations.
- apexalpha 7y agoHumans are notoriously bad at balancing short term profit (a bump in nicotine satisfaction) and long term harm (lung cancer). Humans absolutely need to be protected against themselves in this case.
- jddj 7y agoI'm not sure how you explain the fall in cigarette smoking rates from the 80s until the present day, despite a lack of prohibition. I'm not a smoker, but man did this comment send a chill down my spine.
- ferzul 7y agopretty easy. governments took an oppositional attitude to it. they made it easier to get information about the cons and (at least as importantly) harder to get information about the pros. amongst other things. saying that there's a "lack of prohibition" in cigarettes is kinda missing the point. the fact that one particular approach to discouraging a disapproved substance failed, doesn't mean another approach isn't being tried and - as you note - even successfully.
- jddj 7y agoSorry, I'm not quite sure if you're in agreement or not. The claim was that humans need to be protected from themselves (in the context of the GP comment, this would mean a ban). I meant to imply that since smoking rates declined steadily without a ban, the claim that prohibition is the correct answer because we humans can't stop trading short term pleasure for long term pain seems dubious. That's even without considering our extensive experience with what happens when we prohibit substances which sellers want to sell and still not insignificant parts of the population want to buy.
- ferzul 7y agoi think we agree on the facts and disagree on the interpretation. smoking rates have gone down because the goverment has tried to eradicate it. so far, without a ban. it has been pretty successful. this doesn't say much about the success of a ban, but a lot about the government's ability to protect us from ourself. the effectiveness of bans is far from univocal (which you see to admit by using a condition which would let you move the goalposts whenever i find a counter argument), and a ban on new nicotine products today would be completely different from the ban on alcohol in 1920s America. success doesn't have to be 100% for it to be good policy either, as the ban on murder shows.
- jddj 7y agoI think the difference here is that I don't see education and internalising costs as protecting us from ourselves in the sense given by the OP (that even knowing perfectly the costs, we humans will still make the wrong decision and so need further protection from ourselves). The effectiveness of the campaigns shows that given enough information we can in fact change our behaviours without needing to resort to prohibition, which is probably how I should have phrased my first response and skipped all of the rhetoric.
- ceejayoz 7y agoPurchasing cigarettes as a minor was prohibited in the late 80s.
- wpietri 7y agoThe problem with addiction is that it strongly diminishes the capacity to make choices. So I think at the very least, we need to be deeply suspicious of things like Juul. And advertising, of course, is meant to subvert rational choice as well, so given that Juul is mostly a marketing company for a highly addictive drug, anybody valuing people making their own choices should be very concerned about it.