Children Aged 17 and Younger Face a Lifetime Ban on Smoking in Legislation Aiming to Create a 'Smoke-Free Generation'

The cigarette and vape black market will be the lamest black market in the history of the world

I don't know if it's because of high prices or vapes or some other factor, but cigarette smoking has essentially disappeared from public life in San Francisco and much of California. There is no real black market because there is no real demand.

Yes. But it also lowers the occurrences in the general population. People are less likely to risk being a criminal to pursue their vices than to just not do it.

yeah organized crime will never arise around markets of vices that are subject to PROHIBITION

Seriously. They've raised the prices so much here in Canada our black market is bigger than the legal market.

Who is gonna pay black market rates for some c**** ass cigarettes?

Did smoking just become cool again?

Don't be a wise guy... give me some of those butts, yeah see?

Better on underground markets than the supermarket

A friend of mine's burger joint was next to a place that had something to do with smuggled cigarettes here in Australia. They got firebombed and my friend couldn't run his business for a couple of months and went bankrupt.

Regardless it will significantly reduce harm in the future. Your ‘what about’ speculation cannot take that away.

Ah the old we can't reduce it by 100% so let's not reduce reduce it at all argument.

It reduces the accessibility, which will help a lot.

The black market is already there. Yeah, it'll get bigger, but so will the crackdowns.

It would still cut smoking by 90%. Kids aren’t going to use the black makers for cigarettes lol

Or a teenage tobacco-fueled mafia.

US cigarette sales have dropped 70 percent since the 80s. No one thinks people will stop smoking altogether, the goal is just to reduce the amount of people smoking.

I feel like they did a good job with my generation. Born in the late 90s so whatever that makes us. They rammed truly horrific anti smoking ads down our throats, and I only knew very few people to actually smoke. And those who did always came across as ashamed about it. But then it feels like they dropped the ball with it after that. I see so many people born in the 2000s on almost flaunting their smoking, like its something theyre proud of.

I'm not sure you understand how heavily people smoked in the post WW2 era and how much it got reduced by regulation and taxes.

Even with the rise of vape usage, the smoking of tobacco with teens is still at an all time low. It was around 8% according to the CDC in 2024. I can’t find anything for 2025 from the CDC or FDA but Google says it’s 7.5% now…but I don’t trust the source. Point is I think modern hysteria over kids vaping, while valid, is way overblown. I feel like a full on ban is only going to push trends in the other direction.

All the stores in my area have you scan your ID no matter how old you look. Their system won’t allow the sale to go through unless an ID is scanned. Kind of funny seeing old ladies who look 85 get carded.

As someone who quit for 15 years and is now smoking again ffs just ban them, I have no self control.

Not being dismissive, but interested to know what the concern is here with regards to comparing this to normal drug laws? The primary addiction in cigarettes is the nicotine. No one is addicted to tar and other chemicals in cigarettes. Cigarette addiction related deaths here in the UK is ~70,000. Alcohol, which is commonly compared, is around ~10,000. We have plenty of other legal ways to consume nicotine, which are completely fine and an order of magnitude safer than cigarettes.

Sure, individuals should to an extent be allowed to do what they like. But billion dollar multinational companies shouldn't profit off getting people addicted to death sticks that cause a huge burden on society and our publicly funded healthcare.

Does that principle extend to countries that have universal healthcare? At what point is one’s right to be destitute or self-destructive countered by the reality of others needing to foot the bill? Slippery slope, perhaps, and I’m wary of most politics of enforced respectability. But in the UK we have a straining universal healthcare system, and a degree of that strain is caused by people exercising their ‘right’ to give themselves chronic illnesses that need significant medical attention. And there are ways to make oneself destitute or gross without cigarettes. People often frame it as ‘personal freedoms’, but, especially in a country that could never grow tobacco, the only real ‘right’ being infringed on here is corporations’ ability to profit from addiction and cancer.

I think it's a few thousand years too late to be thinking that humans can't collectively decide on behaviours that aren't acceptable.

You would have a point, if your addiction didn't interfere with other people's right for a good health. Tobacco smoke affects everyone around you.

In the UK we have free healthcare. People can do what they like in a system where they just f****** die on the street and no one gives a f*** That’s much more dystopian though isnt it?

Yes, but vaping companies market and sell to kids to get them addicted with the goal of creating life long customers. So in the same way you shouldn't let 14 year olds have access to heroin, they shouldn't have access to bubble gum vape.

Thats how it worked in the USA with booze! We banned alcohol in the 1920s, it was a tough first decade but now we're a completely alcohol free nation! We had similar success getting rid of all marijuana, cocaine, meth and such too.

As a long time smoker who's struggled to quit over and over again, part of the reason they're so difficult to give up is because you can get them *everywhere*. You can walk into any gas station and get a pack of smokes no matter where you are.  I wish they'd just ban them altogether.

Exactly, it’s not it will wipe cigarette use completely, but it WILL reduce it

by any risk assessment of various drugs i've ever seen cannabis is way less harmful than cigs tbf, so its a pretty consistent stance if you're looking at harm reduction rather than a pure "drugs good/bad" lens

I was about to say, try living in Spain. Every time your food is set down outside, some a****** lights up and it blows right to your table. Then when he’s done, some other a****** lights up.

Tiny difference: the prohibition took alcohol away from people who were already used or even addicted to it. This takes away from people who hopefully aren't addicted yet.

The governemnt should not be able to dictate what people consume. If they want to harm their bodies over decades from smoking thats on them. It seems like everyone is for this stuff so long as its not something they partake in. If this is about health they should ban alcohol and high sugar content too since those also cause health issues down the road. Hell...might as well ban people from sitting in front of a computer too long as thats unhealthy. This shit is a slippery slope. I say all this as a non smoker that hates smoking. Government has no place being a nanny state dictating what people do that concerns themself.

It will make it more difficult to get and that alone is likely to discourage newer users. If the penalties are financial and not incarceration that will also discourage without life altering consequences as well.

Nicotine is not like other harder drugs, it's a lame lifestyle drug. It doesn't deliver the oomph that is required for an illegal market. IT's not coke, it's not weed, so if nicotine is banned no one will pay top dollar for it I'm in the US and even here people act like vaping is a bad habit to be excused

This is the UK. We raised the age to buy/use niccotine products to 18 in 2007, just after we banned smoking in enclosed public and workplaces. No one affected by this new law has ever been able to legally smoke.

Yeah it's a fraction now. But nicotine usage is on the rise or actually rocketing because vapes and nicotine pouches. Why do they care about the few people actually smoking? It's not like it's in public places, no one cares people drink at home or get stoned at home.

Yeah, being sad is definitely worse than being dead.

Tobacco sales are already taxed very highly. Higher than anything else.