I don't think there's any doubt that smoking is a dangerous habit. I'm curious, though, if the government could ever get away with hammering other products in the PR market as they do with tobacco.

i doubt it...




every 31 minutes somebody is killed by drunk driving.
every 2 minutes somebody is injured by drunk driving.

The government goes after drunk driving pretty hard, so...

:?

How do we do this on one side and continue supporting the price of tobacco on the other?

The government goes after drunk driving pretty hard, so...

OK, so I accept that banning cigarettes is probably impossible.
But this is silly. It is just weird and will not be very effective. Everyone knows that cigarettes are deadly and dangerous. Everyone in the country. Everyone. This is going to have such a minimal effect on getting people to quit or on stopping people from smoking.
Go after the extraneous and deadly and overly addictive crap that's been added into cigarettes in the last few decades, instead. People will smoke no matter what. Continue and expand education programs, be aggressive in keeping cigarettes away from kids, and make the cigarettes that are available to adults as un-toxic as possible.
Also, tax the shit out of them. I'd love if no one smoked anymore. People who start smoking now, knowing everything that we do, are consciously making a decision that they know is bad. I have no problem with pulling as much money as possible out of their wallets, even if to do nothing else but to support the Medicaid program that they are often burdening.

OK, so I accept that banning cigarettes is probably impossible.
But this is silly. It is just weird and will not be very effective. Everyone knows that cigarettes are deadly and dangerous. Everyone in the country. Everyone. This is going to have such a minimal effect on getting people to quit or on stopping people from smoking.
Go after the extraneous and deadly and overly addictive crap that's been added into cigarettes in the last few decades, instead. People will smoke no matter what. Continue and expand education programs, be aggressive in keeping cigarettes away from kids, and make the cigarettes that are available to adults as un-toxic as possible.
Also, tax the shit out of them. I'd love if no one smoked anymore. People who start smoking now, knowing everything that we do, are consciously making a decision that they know is bad. I have no problem with pulling as much money as possible out of their wallets, even if to do nothing else but to support the Medicaid program that they are often burdening.

I think the end game for cigarettes is that they won't need to be banned because so few people will smoke them in the first place. It'll probably take another generation or two, but that's my guess--which, of course, is worth about as much as any other prediction.

The Australian government has done this for many years now. It also costs almost $20 to buy a pack of 25 cigarettes. Stores which sell cigarettes are not allowed to display them, they have to be kept in plain white cabinets with no signage except for brand, type and price and obligatory government warnings.

It's seen a decrease to the % of people who take up smoking and an increase to the % of people quitting smoking.

They've just introduced legislation to force tobacco companies to have plain white packaging which allows them only identify the brand name and type while still carrying images similar to the ones above with government health warnings. The tobacco companies are fighting this hard but it's pretty much guaranteed to be passed into law in the next month.

God damned communists.