UK plans to pass law banning anyone born after 2008 to buy cigarettes

People always get cigarettes. Banning them makes them even more attractive. When you tell people they can’t do something, there will always be people who do it exactly for that reason. Supporting this proposal criminalizes those who don’t conform, and in this case it criminalizes them for life. Many people will get addicted to nicotine at a young age when they aren’t capable of making lifelong decisions. Is being a lifelong criminal because of that what they need? Black market cigarettes are a thing. They’re so prevalent where I live, that when I smoked it was not only easier to buy them from a street vendor (it was easier to find one than a mini-mart) but are less than 1/5 the price of what I would pay in the legitimate stores. Because they are everywhere, I easily made a relationship with the guy who sold them nearest me and although that was only a few minutes to walk, since I bought by the carton, he gave me an even lower price and I could get them delivered. These weren’t screwed up cigarettes, they were factory made cigarettes that were shipped all the way across the Pacific to get to me, and with the discount, they cost $1 (one dollar) per pack. The last time I paid $1 a pack in a store was in 1988, so this is a good indication to run with when it comes to how much of the price is just plain tax. The tax laws have been screwed up, they may have helped make millions of people feel like outsiders and degenerates of society and bullied them into quitting, but the dialogue around it is clearly also fucked up both with the shame it puts on people and the justification of the amount of taxes that have been put on them. This discussion is obviously not about tax, but banning something. Banning things that only marginally effect you is intrusive and is born in the desire to arrogantly, through pedantic and unrealistic idealism, micromanage something that is probably none of your business. If we were talking about alcohol or marijuana I could understand an argument to the contrary, in the case of weed where the smell of it really fucks people up who have a problem and would rather not be around it, but having quit smoking cigarettes, I can’t really see that argument as valid, and I really doubt arguments about second hand smoke are based in anything except for the same sort of naive idealism and failure to consider the fellow person that is effected by it, but instead judge what they should and should not do when it comes to things that are none of your business. Smokers smoke outside, it’s the norm, and passing laws to tell people what they can’t do when it harms virtually no one is an exercise in control for the sake of control. It is no surprise that we see this out of the UK. I should add that this thing where you raise the legal age year after year does not work. My boarding school tried this, I was 14 and every year I was one year behind the age when it would have been fine for me to smoke, as a result and like every single other addicted kid, I just hid it. I was criminalized for it by the school, obviously. This feels a lot to me like the result of the slow progression that we see with our privacy and our other fundamental rights being given up over time. Tobacco kills, it is horrible, though this law makes it more attractive to the people who are at high risk for smoking in the first place… and it’s a state sponsored and citizen approved method of micromanaging individuals in the name of coming together as an arrogant community. I should add, the last time I bought black market cigarettes, for a friend, they were only $1.50 and that some of the stores sell them instead of the high priced taxed ones because they make more money that way. If cigarettes were banned, they would still sell the illegal ones in the stores. It is what it is.