Rishi Sunak is considering introducing some of the world’s toughest anti-smoking measures that would in effect ban the next generation from ever being able to buy cigarettes, the Guardian has learned.
Whitehall sources said the prime minister was looking at measures similar to those brought in by New Zealand last December. They involved steadily increasing the legal smoking age so tobacco would end up never being sold to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009.
All these progressively restrictive laws have been good to me. I'm of the generation who remembers smoking on planes, and my grandmother smoking in her hospital bed.
I was probably at two packs a day in the nineties because it was cheap and acceptable.
These days, a pack will last me a week, and I only ever smoke in my backyard at home, in clothing dedicated to the habit that get washed separately from my other clothes.
Bans and social stigma have forced me into near non-smoking without ever consciously trying.
Do I ever have an occasional night of celebratory drinking where I exceed that trend? You betcha, and I don't feel sorry about it. But I'm glad that I'm not the chain smoking beef jerky with a voice three octaves lower than it should be that my grandparents were.
I still believe that people should be able to enjoy vice and that you shouldn't be completely ostracized from society for not living a perfect organic free range fair trade intoxicant free perfectly vegan whatever else life.
But to phase out tobacco as it has been going, I have found that I haven't minded at all in the long term.
(As to the occasional celebratory night, for completely different reasons, I hardly drink anymore. Also was not a conscious choice or effort. It just lost its attraction for me)
What’s a “progressively restrictive law”?
The first smoking bans were sections of airplanes
Then they were for domestic flights under two hours
Then they were for domestic flights
Then they were for all flights
The first restaurant bans were only the dining area
Then they included the bar area
Then they hit stand alone bars
The smoking bans you know today did not hit all at once. They got progressively more restrictive over a period of many years.
I remember going to restaurants as a kid and being asked if we wanted the smoking or non-smoking section. It seems kind of surreal these days that this was ever a thing. I'm probably the last generation to remember indoor smoking.
Back many many moons ago in the year 2008 I traveled to the great city Vancouver to see a friend. They took me to a venue to see a band and cigarette smoking wasn't allowed.
But you bet your fucking ass there was plenty of people smoking weed. Which seems to be just fine…breathing in second hand smoke…which is the main reason these tabacco restrictions are in place.
EDIT
I don't care if you smoke weed, only it has the same second hand smoke issue tabacco does and should follow the same rule.
It smells so much worse too
In the US, cigarette smoking had already peaked and begun to decline before smoking bans. The bans almost certainly accelerated the decline, though.
A law that is slightly more restrictive than the last that will be followed by a slightly more restrictive law.
Stopping cigarette companies giving away packs of 5 outside colleges if you could prove you were over 16 was a sensible progressively restrictive law that followed to them not being displayed in shops and having warnings in the packets for example.
Man, my freshman year of college, in California of all places, we had cigarette vending machines in our freshman dorm. The only smoking policy in your dorm room was that your roommate had to be cool with it. Zero designated non-smoking rooms. There was a smoking section inside the cafeteria. You couldn't smoke during class, but the professors could smoke in their offices and we had a coffee bar in the building that was one huge cloud.
How things have changed, eh?