Should smoking be banned outright?

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I think everything would be much better without smoking. I don't particularly care if people like wasting their money on cigarettes, but I do care about not inhaling their smoke, and I do care about not paying for their inflated healthcare. (I understand the principle could be extended to other activities or habits, but those would have to be evaluated separately.)

The "good for the economy" argument is quite strange. If smoking stopped, it would redirect resources to other sectors with little long term consequences. Fewer people would seek jobs in the tobacco industry, fields would be slowly converted to other crops, capital would be invested elsewhere, just as consummers would spend their money elsewhere, all distributed between all other fields of production. I hardly think any hypothetical consequence from jobs lost, decreased concumption, etc., would be worst to the economy than losing people and their abilities many years too early.

However, banning it altogether is really not an efficient way to stop smoking. It would just create a huge black market. Increasing taxes is, to me, a very adequate method. This would compensate for the increased health care costs as well as create a stronger financial incentive not to smoke. There should also be cultural changes, but I don't really know how that could be done "from the top". To be honest, I don't understand why anyone smokes in the first place. It seems so irrational I don't know how it can be fought with any kind of reason.

The best way to 'ban' something is simply make it obsolete or irrelevant. Things like 'blue cigs' are helping a lot of smokers who don't want to smoke find the alternatives to quit or at a minimum get past the tar.

These days it seems like more and more people, at least in my generation (Gen X/Y border) and younger are typically just social smokers and if they smoke at all its typically when they drink. When two pack a day smokers are a growing rarity and even one pack a day smokers, we're getting to a place where I'd think we're pointing way too much hate at something that's diminishing on its own anyway.

That and in a lot of ways it seems like all the anti-smoking fervor is mostly because people find it 'Ewwwy'. When that sort of calumny jumps out regularly it tends to discredit their argument and tends to make independent-minded people even *want* to smoke just to flip them the bird, let alone it makes the anti-tobacco and 'Truth' people look like excited basketcases.

The year I quit smoking cigarettes (1962) they were going for about 32 cents a pack.

ruveyn

Although people are welcome to poison their bodies if they want, the problem I have with cigarettes is the massive profits that the tobacco companies make from it. I wouldn't ban smoking outright, but I would ban all tobacco advertising in all forms (commercials, ads in magazines, product placement, sponsorship, etc.), regulate packaging to that it would consist entirely of a warning label, with the brand name in a small, standardized font, regulate cigarettes so that companies can't make gimmicky ones to try to get people to smoke, and most of all I would ban smoking in all public places, outdoors or indoors. If you want to smoke in your house, apartment, yard, or balcony then fine, but I should not be obliged to inhale carcinogens when I'm waiting at the bus stop.