Reversal of smoking ban criticised as ‘shameful’ for lacking evidence
New Zealand is repealing the world’s first smoking ban passed under former prime minister Jacinda Arden’s government to pave the way for a smoke-free generation amid backlash from researchers and campaigners over its risk to Indigenous people.
The new coalition government led by prime minister Christopher Luxon confirmed the repeal will happen on Tuesday, delivering on one of the actions of his coalition’s ambitious 100-day plan.
The government repeal will be put before parliament as a matter of urgency, enabling it to scrap the law without seeking public comment, in line with previously announced plans.
Hey New Zealand, how’s it goin’?
reads article
Oh. Right wing garbage huh. Sorry. It’s everywhere.
There’s a lot of money to be made telling people who are afraid of things new things for them to be afraid of. You could also use it to grab power.
You don’t see the irony, do you? This type of propaganda is why smoking was banned in the first place. It works for the left as well as the right. GMOs, gluten, nuclear power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Democracy_Union
There are a bunch of groups such as ^this one and they have a lot of money and influence.
Probably because the left doesn’t really have a vision to offer, we should be promoting a better future for all and showing how we can achieve it but instead we’ve got infighting, purity culture, self destructive idealism, and calls for making life harder on regular people in pretty much every way possible.
The vibe I get is that the left usually points at things that need to change and offers solutions to the problems they see.
And the right campaigns on “not that”
right wing politicians are cunts. all of them.
Wtf, it’s difficult to imagine a more directly harmful and scientifically evidenced habit.
absurd
I see people on this site say all the time that all drugs should be legalized and we should allocate the money used to enforce drug laws on addiction resources instead. I’m not sure why this harmful drug is different. I totally support anti cigarette campaigns but I’m not sure bans are a good tool in general.
There are a few good reasons.
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cigarettes are more harmful than any of the other harmful drugs you’re referencing, and all of those “harmful drugs” combined.
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cigarettes were unnecessarily designed to be more harmful and addictive than necessary
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bans come in many forms and have many uses
I’ll preface this by saying I’m one of those people that think all drugs should be legally regulated and available.
That won’t result in all drugs having equal regulations, just as the regulations for driving a bicycle versus driving a car are different, auto drivers requiring more regulations because of how much more dangerous they are.
Drugs, even the illegal ones, are nowhere near as harmful as cigarettes or kill as many people as cigarettes, and a lot of these drugs may be mixed with a few chemicals, not hundreds.
Magic mushrooms are biologically harmless, for example: shrooms are about half as toxic as caffeine, one of the most common and addictive legal regulated chemicals in the world.
When I talk about supporting this ban on cigarettes, I’m specifically supporting this ban in this country at this time as a good way to show cigarette corporations the consequences of continuing to market a known harmful product at the expense of society.
If that ban had lasted for even a couple of years, the companies would be forced to adapt their manufacturing or even mission statement so that they were producing less harmful cigarettes.
Even with the short amount of time it was active, it’s a clear shot around the bow globally to cigarette companies and other companies purposely using cheaper and more toxic ingredients for their products, telling them that they’re going to have to change what they’re doing.
Because of worldwide lax regulations, the historical popularity of smoking plants, the enormous profit margin, corporate legal lobbying supremacy and modern mercantilism(capitalism), we have the result that at least 7 million people are directly dying every year from a product designed to addict you with toxic compounds and is scientifically, indisputably proven to violently harm you.
We aren’t including plantation slavery, second hand smoke, manufacturing deaths, or any other processes and infrastructures that have gone into propping up the industry
So quick math, well over a billion people in the last century, well over 10% of the Earth’s current population, has died because of cigarettes, most of them from directly known toxic substances and processes sold to people under false pretences.
Prohibitions don’t work, but regulations do, which are simply targeted prohibitions.
Lowering the amount of mercury and lead in the water and air of the United States has significantly lowered the amount of birth defects, chronic illnesses and cancers in the United States.
Not using a particular red dye that was found to be carcinogenic meant m&m and cake shops had to take a decade to reformulate a non-toxic red dye, but because of that regulation requiring a safer product, cancer and illness rates dropped.
Banning cigarettes is not going to stop people from smoking cigarettes, but a nationwide ban on an indisputably toxic substance is practically and politically important so that companies know the momentum that they’ve built up pushing their unnecessarily toxic products is losing steam.
Alcohol is indeed bad for you, but not on the level of cigarettes. Cigarettes are intentionally filled with additive chemicals that both cause them to be hyper addictive and substantially raise the risk of cancer. They are designed to be deadly from the ground up in the name of making a few extra bucks.
Vast sums of money have also been spent on inveigling the public into believing that cigarettes are better for you than they actually are, up to and including the purchasing of scientists to draw false conclusions in public studies in order to present cigarettes as healthy.
The sheer maliciousness of the cigarette industry is shocking and terrible, I just don’t think there’s a real comparison here.
Also, tobacco is a lot harder to grow and process than alcohol. I’ve got everything I need in my house right now to mix up a batch of mead, and I don’t even have any specialized equipment. A quick trip to the hardware store and I’ve got a still. It’s also not like weed where you can have a plant in a closet and get a couple months worth of flower.
My heart goes out to you because alcohol is a cruel mistress.
But banning a substance never works, if it did we wouldn’t have people addicted to illegal substances.
A senior MP in the govt is a former tobacco industry goon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Bishop
Came in here to criticize the concept of a smoking ban based on comparisons to prohibition and the “war on drugs” in America, but reading through the article it actually sounds somewhat reasonable. Using regulation to reduce nicotine content sounds fantastic - no one should be forced to smoke if they don’t want to, and making tobacco less addicting might actually help to accomplish that.
Still not a fan of prohibition as a means of addressing health issues, but I suppose it’s different when your country has universal healthcare.
no one should be forced to smoke if they don’t want to
In what universe is anyone being forced to smoke??
There are unnecessarily large amounts of nicotine in cigarettes, making them very addictive.
Forced is a strong word, but many smokers aren’t smoking out of free will either
Sure, and I’d support smoking cessation resources at public expense. Not banning though
a) studies don’t show it’s harmful unless you live or work with someone who smokes indoors*
b) smoking in public areas, even outdoors, is mostly banned already
*note: you will find some proclamations from official and pseudo-official bodies saying things like “there is no safe level of secondhand smoke”. These are shameful goddamn lies and when you try to find the science they’re based on, you find nothing at all. When you look at the actual report collating every study ever done on secondhand smoke you’ll find that every single study has only measured effects of prolonged exposure to indoor smoking. There has been no study, ever, that I’m aware of, that has shown a correlation between occasional outdoor secondhand smoke and increased cancer or other negative effects
But all that being said, again, smokers (in the West) are mostly relegated to certain designated outdoor areas which you are free to not go to.
