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Smoking is one of those harmful activities where state has some incentives to not be too proactive in preventing people from doing it. Eases a lot of social sec

Smoking is one of those harmful activities where state has some incentives to not be too proactive in preventing people from doing it. Eases a lot of social security costs down the line (vs cancer treatments, but many go out quickly via heart attack or stroke, just like my uncle did). Quickest fix would be total ban (with addicts moving en masse to black market). Not practically possible in regular democracies. Its up to people themselves for the most effective care. Easy talk about addiction which is ranked around cca heroin addiction in terms of how difficult it is to shed it. One always pays for one's mistakes, here its actually the offsprings...

efnx 1y ago
> Not practically possible in regular democracies. In what kind of irregular democracy is this practical? Not arguing, just curious.
- kakacik 1y ago
  Benevolent dictatorship with a veneer of democracy? Or any system that does motivate pushing for long term actual solutions, not just chasing votes for next election cycle.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >In what kind of irregular democracy is this practical? Insane levels of homogeneous demographics and group think. Think like HOA or school board chock full o' Karens doing something wild. That's the kind of situation you'd need.
yard2010 1y ago
This makes me wonder, in democracies there are stuff you simply cannot ban. What is the solution?
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago
  Tax.
- rightbyte 1y ago
  You can bann cigarettes for 18yo and under and then increase the age limit once a year by a year. You really have to force it to get hooked on tobacco. Dunno how many would bother without convenient access.
- eru 1y ago
  Just tax them. Countries are already doing that. Why do we need to ban them? If people want to smoke them, let them. The tax can take care of externalities. (And I say that as someone who hates smoking.)
  - Rodeoclash 1y ago
    Australia has taxed cigarettes so much that a thriving black market has started that nobody seems interested in policing. Alcohol appears to be going in the same direction.
    - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
      Easy, don't tax so much that it becomes ineffective. There is a sweet spot to find. Honestly, I dislike smoking as much as anyone else but I frankly oppose the way Australia is taxing cigarettes and alcohol. These are sin taxes. They are high to deter people from doing things they want to do. That's overreach. Taxes should aim to cover externalities. That's fair. Your choice forces a burden on the collectivity which it's trying to recoup. Above that, that's just coercion and paternalism. Plus it disproportionally affects the poor but I guess the moral police pushing for this kind of taxes sees that as a benefit.
      - philipallstar 1y ago
        If your citizens are hooked on an addictive product, you can jack up the taxes.
        eru 1y ago
        Please check the earlier posts in the discussion you are commenting on. Even if you have the most addictive substance on the planet, the black market puts an upper bound on how much you can tax it.
        philipallstar 1y ago
- beeflet 1y ago
  lace 1/100 (or some other number, 1/1000?) cigarettes with a lethal dose of cyanide
- Gareth321 1y ago
  Restriction of rights is a spectrum. For example, we know that driving cars carries some (very small) risk. If we banned driving, fewer people would die (from car related accidents). This must be balanced against individual rights and social outcomes. If we banned cars, how many people would lose their jobs? How many people would be unable to get to hospital? It's like that banning cars would cause more harm than lives it saves. This is an extreme scenario to illustrate not all bad things should be banned. Smoking is more nuanced. For the most part (as long as public spaces and spaces with children are appropriately regulated), smokers hurt only themselves. In countries with public healthcare, this can increase care costs, but most studies now find that because smokers die much younger, their combined lifetime costs are actually lower. Old people are very expensive to care for. So the question becomes: to what degree do we want the state preventing people from hurting themselves? Where does that authority end? Alcohol? Sugar? Fatty foods? Less than eight hours of sleep? Not exercising? Too much TV and iPad? Social media? Not reading enough books? This is, IMHO, a slippery slope. For reasons of ideology and pragmatism, I do not support regulation for "victimless" activities, unless there are significant social costs/harm. This means I support legal tobacco, marijuana, MDMA, alcohol, and and many other drugs. I also support the right to partake in extreme sports, eating junk food and sugar, and not exercising. The implications of this particular study are very difficult to morally and legally navigate. If smoking while young can make children age slightly faster, surely there is a moral imperative to prevent those who are 15 and younger from smoking? I believe that is the case in most of the West already. However we also know that parents who don't exercise and eat poorly also tend to pass along these habits to their children. Should we also ban parents from eating at McDonalds?
- rsynnott 1y ago
  Generally, you discourage them with taxes or other restrictions. Most developed countries have very high taxes, and various legal restrictions, on tobacco, say. Many have high taxes on sugar. There aren't really _that_ many things which fall into the "clearly harmful, but people won't give them up" category; tobacco, alcohol, sugar, maybe meat (this one can be, and has been incessantly, argued both ways to an extent), would be the big ones.
lynx97 1y ago
I always wonder about the heroin comparison. I just doesn't check out for me. Feels inappropriate. Heroin has pretty pronounced withdrawal symptoms, which are (AIUI) mostly physical withdrawal. At least from personal experience, nicotine withdrawal doesn't do anything to me. I just recently spent a day in an ICU, and had no craving at all. Same for longer smoking breaks, like a week or two. No craving. However, I sometimes miss the socialisation / being occupied thing, which is plain mental addiction. Maybe I am special in this regard, but I doubt it. Most "nervious" smokers I met were, IMO, "protesting" against the fact that they are currently not free to do what they wanted. You can hype yourself up a lot without actual physical reasons.
- esseph 1y ago
  There are certain genetic markers that can make it extremely hard to quit - nothing like you experienced.
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  > You can hype yourself up a lot It's likely that you're doing this to yourself by underselling your cravings. Presumably you came out of your ICU visit and began smoking again but you've lied to yourself about the reasons why. The physical aspect of nicotine addiction is extremely well documented.
- sfn42 1y ago
  I agree. I've never done heroin but I understand the withdrawal is absolutely horrible. I stopped using nicotine this month. I've been using snus which is a Nordic product similar to chewing tobacco. You put it under your upper lip, the type I've been using has significantly more nicotine per dose than a cigarette. Like 2-4 times as much, 25mg per dose. It was fine. The first day was pretty hard for me, I was sitting next to a lady who kept her snus box on her desk and I really wanted to bum one but didn't. Day two was a bit easier, day three easier still and after that I felt like I was done. I'm on day 16 now and hardly think about it any more. It's strange because I've been using nicotine for almost two decades and I've been wanting to drop it for most of that time, even did drop it once but blundered and started again a year or so later. I've tried and failed to quit so many times, but the times that it's actually worked have always just felt like a state of mind difference. Like I didn't really want to quit the other times. When I really decide and all doubt is gone it's quite easy to quit. It's just hard to get to that state of mind and keep it.
keiferski 1y ago
To me the key element is the addiction aspect. It’s one thing to ingest a substance which has good short term results but bad long term ones, but entirely another when the machinery of corporations is used to maximize that usage and make it as addictive as possible. As a side note, the movie The Insider by Michael Mann with Al Pacino and Russell Crowe is the single most effective anti-smoking thing I’ve come across. It shows how evil those corporations are and what they did to a whistleblower.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  You say that as if smoking tobacco that does not come from corporations would not be addictive! All forms of tobacco are inherently addictive due to the presence of naturally occurring nicotine, which is the main driver of addiction.
  - keiferski 1y ago
    Part of the scandal covered in The Insider is that tobacco companies deliberately added carcinogenic compounds to cigarettes in order to increase the impact of nicotine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_%26_Williamson#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_%26_Williamson#Controver... So sure, tobacco is still addictive, but as I said in my comment, my main issue is with the hacking/maximization of this by corporations. Especially when that hacking involves adding even more poisonous chemicals.
- lithocarpus 1y ago
  See also, processed food!
- jjgreen 1y ago
  Smartphones are addictive and designed by large corporations to be so. Ready to give yours up?
  - keiferski 1y ago
    No, because I didn't say anything about forcing people to give up cigarettes. But it seems reasonable to me to have legislation that limits how addictive corporations can make them. Applying the same type of legislation to social media apps (for children, at least) seems reasonable to me.
thomasfromcdnjs 1y ago
I never understand why people don't talk about banning the general usage of sugar, probably has far worse effects on societal systems than smoking does. (attention, fatness, hormonal imbalances)
- lynx97 1y ago
  Because it is waaaay easier to bully minorities, esp. in democracies? If you take something away from the majority, you run a huge risk of loosing in the next election...
- andsoitis 1y ago
  > I never understand why people don't talk about banning the general usage of sugar, probably has far worse effects on societal systems than smoking does. (attention, fatness, hormonal imbalances) Here is the US Health Secretary talking about it: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/22/rfk-jr-sugar-poison-food-dyes https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/22/rfk-jr-sugar...
- gmac 1y ago
  Because that would be utterly ludicrous? I enjoy a few small sweet things every day as part of a healthy diet. This harms nobody, me included. Much better to make more effort in schools to teach people how to cook good food (including enough fat and salt that it's actually tasty). Plus maybe change some relative prices so that they eat less sugar on average.
  - Pooge 1y ago
    Natural sweet things are healthy (fruits are an example). Processed food where sugar was added to make it addictive is not. I would argue most pastries are not healthy but you can make them at home and remove 50% of the sugar if you really crave one. For salt, I disagree. Normal humans don't need to add salt to a varied diet. Table salt is completely unneeded but most think food tastes bland without salt because their taste buds have adjusted to it.
    - 1y ago
bamboozled 1y ago
They hiked the taxes so high on cigarettes in Australia, they basically created a cigarette mafia. Look it up. It's out of control.
- jojobas 1y ago
  It's to do with complete lack of will to enforce. You can open a dodgy tobacconist shop, get shut down with a ridiculously low non-personal penalty, and open another one two doors down.
  - bamboozled 1y ago
    Funny thing is, in Australia it's been like that for a long time, black market cigarettes have been around for a lonnnggg time.

efnx 1y ago

> Not practically possible in regular democracies. In what kind of irregular democracy is this practical? Not arguing, just curious.

kakacik 1y ago
Benevolent dictatorship with a veneer of democracy? Or any system that does motivate pushing for long term actual solutions, not just chasing votes for next election cycle.
potato3732842 1y ago
>In what kind of irregular democracy is this practical? Insane levels of homogeneous demographics and group think. Think like HOA or school board chock full o' Karens doing something wild. That's the kind of situation you'd need.

yard2010 1y ago

This makes me wonder, in democracies there are stuff you simply cannot ban. What is the solution?

tonyedgecombe 1y ago
Tax.
rightbyte 1y ago
You can bann cigarettes for 18yo and under and then increase the age limit once a year by a year. You really have to force it to get hooked on tobacco. Dunno how many would bother without convenient access.
eru 1y ago
Just tax them. Countries are already doing that. Why do we need to ban them? If people want to smoke them, let them. The tax can take care of externalities. (And I say that as someone who hates smoking.)
- Rodeoclash 1y ago
  Australia has taxed cigarettes so much that a thriving black market has started that nobody seems interested in policing. Alcohol appears to be going in the same direction.
  - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    Easy, don't tax so much that it becomes ineffective. There is a sweet spot to find. Honestly, I dislike smoking as much as anyone else but I frankly oppose the way Australia is taxing cigarettes and alcohol. These are sin taxes. They are high to deter people from doing things they want to do. That's overreach. Taxes should aim to cover externalities. That's fair. Your choice forces a burden on the collectivity which it's trying to recoup. Above that, that's just coercion and paternalism. Plus it disproportionally affects the poor but I guess the moral police pushing for this kind of taxes sees that as a benefit.
    - philipallstar 1y ago
      If your citizens are hooked on an addictive product, you can jack up the taxes.
      - eru 1y ago
        Please check the earlier posts in the discussion you are commenting on. Even if you have the most addictive substance on the planet, the black market puts an upper bound on how much you can tax it.
        philipallstar 1y ago
beeflet 1y ago
lace 1/100 (or some other number, 1/1000?) cigarettes with a lethal dose of cyanide
Gareth321 1y ago
Restriction of rights is a spectrum. For example, we know that driving cars carries some (very small) risk. If we banned driving, fewer people would die (from car related accidents). This must be balanced against individual rights and social outcomes. If we banned cars, how many people would lose their jobs? How many people would be unable to get to hospital? It's like that banning cars would cause more harm than lives it saves. This is an extreme scenario to illustrate not all bad things should be banned. Smoking is more nuanced. For the most part (as long as public spaces and spaces with children are appropriately regulated), smokers hurt only themselves. In countries with public healthcare, this can increase care costs, but most studies now find that because smokers die much younger, their combined lifetime costs are actually lower. Old people are very expensive to care for. So the question becomes: to what degree do we want the state preventing people from hurting themselves? Where does that authority end? Alcohol? Sugar? Fatty foods? Less than eight hours of sleep? Not exercising? Too much TV and iPad? Social media? Not reading enough books? This is, IMHO, a slippery slope. For reasons of ideology and pragmatism, I do not support regulation for "victimless" activities, unless there are significant social costs/harm. This means I support legal tobacco, marijuana, MDMA, alcohol, and and many other drugs. I also support the right to partake in extreme sports, eating junk food and sugar, and not exercising. The implications of this particular study are very difficult to morally and legally navigate. If smoking while young can make children age slightly faster, surely there is a moral imperative to prevent those who are 15 and younger from smoking? I believe that is the case in most of the West already. However we also know that parents who don't exercise and eat poorly also tend to pass along these habits to their children. Should we also ban parents from eating at McDonalds?
rsynnott 1y ago
Generally, you discourage them with taxes or other restrictions. Most developed countries have very high taxes, and various legal restrictions, on tobacco, say. Many have high taxes on sugar. There aren't really _that_ many things which fall into the "clearly harmful, but people won't give them up" category; tobacco, alcohol, sugar, maybe meat (this one can be, and has been incessantly, argued both ways to an extent), would be the big ones.

lynx97 1y ago

I always wonder about the heroin comparison. I just doesn't check out for me. Feels inappropriate. Heroin has pretty pronounced withdrawal symptoms, which are (AIUI) mostly physical withdrawal. At least from personal experience, nicotine withdrawal doesn't do anything to me. I just recently spent a day in an ICU, and had no craving at all. Same for longer smoking breaks, like a week or two. No craving. However, I sometimes miss the socialisation / being occupied thing, which is plain mental addiction. Maybe I am special in this regard, but I doubt it. Most "nervious" smokers I met were, IMO, "protesting" against the fact that they are currently not free to do what they wanted. You can hype yourself up a lot without actual physical reasons.

esseph 1y ago
There are certain genetic markers that can make it extremely hard to quit - nothing like you experienced.
AlecSchueler 1y ago
> You can hype yourself up a lot It's likely that you're doing this to yourself by underselling your cravings. Presumably you came out of your ICU visit and began smoking again but you've lied to yourself about the reasons why. The physical aspect of nicotine addiction is extremely well documented.
sfn42 1y ago
I agree. I've never done heroin but I understand the withdrawal is absolutely horrible. I stopped using nicotine this month. I've been using snus which is a Nordic product similar to chewing tobacco. You put it under your upper lip, the type I've been using has significantly more nicotine per dose than a cigarette. Like 2-4 times as much, 25mg per dose. It was fine. The first day was pretty hard for me, I was sitting next to a lady who kept her snus box on her desk and I really wanted to bum one but didn't. Day two was a bit easier, day three easier still and after that I felt like I was done. I'm on day 16 now and hardly think about it any more. It's strange because I've been using nicotine for almost two decades and I've been wanting to drop it for most of that time, even did drop it once but blundered and started again a year or so later. I've tried and failed to quit so many times, but the times that it's actually worked have always just felt like a state of mind difference. Like I didn't really want to quit the other times. When I really decide and all doubt is gone it's quite easy to quit. It's just hard to get to that state of mind and keep it.

keiferski 1y ago

To me the key element is the addiction aspect. It’s one thing to ingest a substance which has good short term results but bad long term ones, but entirely another when the machinery of corporations is used to maximize that usage and make it as addictive as possible. As a side note, the movie The Insider by Michael Mann with Al Pacino and Russell Crowe is the single most effective anti-smoking thing I’ve come across. It shows how evil those corporations are and what they did to a whistleblower.

andsoitis 1y ago
You say that as if smoking tobacco that does not come from corporations would not be addictive! All forms of tobacco are inherently addictive due to the presence of naturally occurring nicotine, which is the main driver of addiction.
- keiferski 1y ago
  Part of the scandal covered in The Insider is that tobacco companies deliberately added carcinogenic compounds to cigarettes in order to increase the impact of nicotine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_%26_Williamson#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_%26_Williamson#Controver... So sure, tobacco is still addictive, but as I said in my comment, my main issue is with the hacking/maximization of this by corporations. Especially when that hacking involves adding even more poisonous chemicals.
lithocarpus 1y ago
See also, processed food!
jjgreen 1y ago
Smartphones are addictive and designed by large corporations to be so. Ready to give yours up?
- keiferski 1y ago
  No, because I didn't say anything about forcing people to give up cigarettes. But it seems reasonable to me to have legislation that limits how addictive corporations can make them. Applying the same type of legislation to social media apps (for children, at least) seems reasonable to me.

thomasfromcdnjs 1y ago

I never understand why people don't talk about banning the general usage of sugar, probably has far worse effects on societal systems than smoking does. (attention, fatness, hormonal imbalances)

lynx97 1y ago
Because it is waaaay easier to bully minorities, esp. in democracies? If you take something away from the majority, you run a huge risk of loosing in the next election...
andsoitis 1y ago
> I never understand why people don't talk about banning the general usage of sugar, probably has far worse effects on societal systems than smoking does. (attention, fatness, hormonal imbalances) Here is the US Health Secretary talking about it: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/22/rfk-jr-sugar-poison-food-dyes https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/22/rfk-jr-sugar...
gmac 1y ago
Because that would be utterly ludicrous? I enjoy a few small sweet things every day as part of a healthy diet. This harms nobody, me included. Much better to make more effort in schools to teach people how to cook good food (including enough fat and salt that it's actually tasty). Plus maybe change some relative prices so that they eat less sugar on average.
- Pooge 1y ago
  Natural sweet things are healthy (fruits are an example). Processed food where sugar was added to make it addictive is not. I would argue most pastries are not healthy but you can make them at home and remove 50% of the sugar if you really crave one. For salt, I disagree. Normal humans don't need to add salt to a varied diet. Table salt is completely unneeded but most think food tastes bland without salt because their taste buds have adjusted to it.
  - 1y ago

bamboozled 1y ago

They hiked the taxes so high on cigarettes in Australia, they basically created a cigarette mafia. Look it up. It's out of control.

jojobas 1y ago
It's to do with complete lack of will to enforce. You can open a dodgy tobacconist shop, get shut down with a ridiculously low non-personal penalty, and open another one two doors down.
- bamboozled 1y ago
  Funny thing is, in Australia it's been like that for a long time, black market cigarettes have been around for a lonnnggg time.