So many people like to portray everything as a 'personal choice' while ignoring all said implications to others. Very rarely does something only actually impact you.
Too many people use it as a cop-out to avoid being accountable. It's like when meat eaters say it's a 'personal choice.' Like yeah, it is a choice you mean, but it also implicates other things not only you.
The difference being that cigarettes are always unhealthy, no matter how many you smoke, they procure zero benefits. McDonald's is just a meal and becomes an issue if you eat too much of it, once every now and then won't have any consequences.
Banning it for everyone is OK, telling some people that they can't ever because they were born too late is silly, discriminatory and will inevitably create a flourishing black market.
"If it harms the people using it (and makes them addicted and unable to stop even if they wish to), the people around them, and the planet, I don't like it"
If I never have to smell cigarette smoke again and also no one ever uses the medical system to cure the consequences of smoking then I don't care. Otherwise I am all for this.
Except it doesn't, less than 9% of the population in the USA uses tobacco in any form, including in that group is past smokers and vapers so it's probably around 7% or less. Continually attacking a vice that's basically done is just virtue signaling bullshit. Alcoholism has skyrocketed and kills way more people a year, and obesity is now our number one killer by miles. No one is dying from second hand smoke...you sitting in traffic is doing way more damage to your body than getting a random breeze of smoke from someone outside.
You may not know it because you're a smoker (smokers' noses are completely and irreparably fucked), but normal people can tell a cigarette was lit in a 10 meter radius, even on a windy day.
I'm surprised they can still walk around outside, when there are literally cars everywhere. Those are killing way more people on 'second hand' exposure than tobacco.
Except smokers always insist on slowly murdering everyone around them and littering everything in their path. If you want to smoke in a hermetically sealed room and not get close to me for at least 6 hours after, fine by me.
I mean, I understand that it smells really bad to non smokers. On the other hand, statements like this seem so ridiculously over the top that it makes me question you as a person.
We live in car country - assuming you are German as well -, with a wide variety of unhealthy crap that you have to inhale on a daily basis. Smog, exhaust fumes, half the food we can buy is unhealthy.
Honestly I don’t understand how people can be so worked up about smokers in that context. Is it because those are people you can bitch at and boss around, instead of nebulous corps and governments who ignore your calls for climate action and environment protection?
Otherwise it makes no sense. Smokers are already segregated away from non smokers nowadays, what about their freedom to live (or die) as they want? Your freedom not to smell unpleasant things doesn’t trump that. Me farting in your vicinity doesn’t constitute harm to your individual rights.
Your freedom ends where mine begins. You are free to kill yourself, but not to blow cancerous substances on top of me - and yes, that should include cars.
I generally agree, just that it seems cheap to pile on smokers like they are some sort of lepers. Also you are free to go somewhere else when around a smoker. Their habit doesn’t make them second class citizens, or should I say your freedom ends where theirs begins?
If we want clean air we have to start with the actual polluters, not the easy pickings who are just random people. That’s like, obsessively worrying about your personal climate impact when the vast, vast majority of climate change is caused by just a handful of corporations.
I guess we should allow people to sell antifreeze as both an industrial chemical and a soft drink. Arguably, people have the right to quickly and painfully kill themselves as well.
They absolutely are talking about any form of tobacco...hell track and trace in the EU has effectively destroyed the nasal snuff industry in Germany...a form of tobacco that has no deaths on its hands... literally. This is just ignorance being used in the name of "think of the children" hell that's one of the main things everyone keeps bringing up in this thread.
Meanwhile, smoking has been on a sharp decline for decades, is no longer a mass killer...while obesity is and alcoholism has grown 10 fold, so much so that they created a new label called social drinkers because it would put a massive amount of the population into alcoholic territory.
They are either domestic bootlegs or imports. If cigarettes were actually fully banned, organized crime groups would begin mass cigarette smuggling and manufacturing operations. Sounds ridiculous, but it's true