Court upholds town bylaw banning anyone born in 21st century from buying tobacco products
Court upholds town bylaw banning anyone born in 21st century from buying tobacco products
A Massachusetts town that adopted an unusual ordinance banning the sale of tobacco to anyone born in the 21st century is being looked at as a possible model for other cities and towns hoping to further clamp down on cigarettes and other tobacco products.
Realistically, I assume that anyone who wants tobacco and would be affected is just going to buy it outside city limits.
People will drive to county limits, but policies like this have been shown to actually be quite effective. Even if you are willing to drive to a neighboring county, will you do it as often?
This does seem super anti democratic. Banning things for only people of a specific group made up of people who were born into it is pretty gross no matter what it is. If itâs worth banning then it should be banned for everyone. Or no one.
Itâs perfectly democratic; it is, however, horribly illiberal.
This is like Texas when they had dry counties. This didn't stop people from drinking they just drove futher to buy it. This law is dumb they are now going lose tax dollars to the next towm over.
They already do this alcohol why not tobacco
They donât do it for alcohol. Kids eventually become adults and old enough to make their own choices and decide to buy alcohol not. This law would ban people born too late from ever being allowed to buy.
Alcohol has an age requirement that stays where it is, if you're 20, you can buy it in a year. This would be if you're 23 right now, the age requirement is 24. Next year, you'll be 24 and the requirement is 25. In 50 years, you'll be 74 and the requirement is 75, until eventually no one alive is old enough to smoke.
This is a law banning current generations and all following them from the product. This isnât your average, everyday prohibition.
Not sure if Iâm for it or against it, but it is certainly something to pay attention to.
I understand banning something thatâs basically super unhealthy and has direct links to cancer but at the same time, ppl have been smoking and consuming drugs/alcohol for centuries and by stopping ppl from doing it, itâs basically gonna encourage a new generation to try it.
If theyâre gonna start banning things like this, then maybe they should also ban alcohol and talcum powder too since they also have links to cancer as well.
Things like this, ppl should be taught about the effects of drugs/cigarettes/alcohol in a safe environment, not just ban things cuz the law says otherwise. You canât have a black/white approach to those things.
Prohibition has never and will never work, and we have the data to prove it. However, these laws are made by people who want to go and say "I did a thing, re-elect me peasants!"
Is it not just a ban on selling a product? People could grow tobacco, and roll their own.
I didn't read the law, but from the article it looks like it is just a ban on the sale of the product, not personal choice to actually use tobacco.
Politicians making smoking cool again with this one stupid trick.
Prohibition of cigarettes won't work, at best people will just go across an imaginary line to buy cigs, at worst it creates an unregulated black market. Just look at how alcohol prohibition went and the current war on drugs is going. If you want to have any sort of meaningful impact on cigarettes create more sin taxes on the product so people will decide on their own to just not buy them.
Prohibition of cigarettes wonât work
I mean, it depends.
Worth noting that a lot of historical "prohibition" efforts have been tools for hyper-policing certain neighborhoods and ethnic groups rather than efforts to actually prohibit the substance.
Re: former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what Iâm saying? We knew we couldnât make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Did the War on Drugs succeed in breaking the back of the Vietnam-Era antiwar movement and the mass incarceration/assassination of 60s/70s era Civil Rights Leaders? Ab-so-fucking-lutely. In that sense, they were enormously successful.
On the flip side, if you look at serious efforts to regulate sale and distribution of controlled substances, there's some cause for optimism.
Are Dry Counties Safer than Wet Counties?
While dry counties may not be as effective in reducing alcohol-related harms as some people may hope, there is evidence to suggest that other restrictions on alcohol sales may be beneficial. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests limiting the number of days when alcohol can be sold, citing research that suggests that doing so has shown to decrease consumption, alcohol-related violence, and DWIs
Similarly, the CDC also recommends limiting the time in which alcohol can be sold as research has found that increasing the sale of alcohol by two or more hours resulted in increased consumption and motor vehicle crashes.
I should further note that infrastructure improvements, like bus/rail transit and active cab services, do a lot to reduce the negative externalities of excess consumption. Similarly, access to affordable housing and medical services can curb the use of alcohol and heroin as stand-ins for treatment of pain management and depression. And environmental improvements (particularly, de-leading of the water supply and clean-up of toxic dumping sites that contribute to chronic ailments) can reduce demand for pain management drugs at the root.
The idea that you simply can't do anything about drug abuse and its consequences is heavily predicated on the assumption that our Drug Wars have sincerely sought to improve the lives of residents. When policymakers are allowed to pursue reforms that include public services and societal improvements, municipalities report significantly better results than when they're restricted purely to policing and other punitive measures.
In that sense, they were enormously successful.
Well, yeah, but we all know we're talking about people not using the prohibited substances if a prohibition "works".
In that sense, no prohibition has worked.
You can only regulate. Regulation is beneficial. Banning is not.
You can do things about substance abuse. You can not do things about substance use.
In Australia there's already huge issues with a black market and criminal gangs, and that's just with cigarettes being super expensive (like $50+ for a pack).
I think governments should really think about making sure their policies don't backfire, and keeping legal, affordable supply should be part of that.
Although to be fair, the tax on cigarettes does tend to work, Australians generally don't smoke, if you see someone smoking they're usually a recent immigrant or just old.
If you ban tabacco all out its going to create a huge black market. Addicted smokers that don't want to stop aren't just going to stop.
But, raising the legal smoking age with one year every year might work. Tabacco use is already pretty low for GenZ as smoking isn't "cool" like it was in the 70s.
Harm reduction is a thing. The law will mean that fewer people will start smoking. If fewer people smoke, fewer people will wind up in the hospital with lung cancer, meaning less money needs to be spent on healthcare and less crippling medical debt. Arguing against creating a law because "criminals gon criminal" is a non-starter.
There already is a tobacco black market anyway.
Prohibition of cigarettes wonât work[:] at best people will just go across an imaginary line to buy cigs, [and] at worst it creates an unregulated black market.
Oh, I think it does worse than create an underground market.
But millennials won't get tobacco HERE. Soon, maybe the next town will decide they won't get them THERE. Think globally, act locally.
Seriously this will make cigarettes look cool and rebellious again to young kids, and guess who will have cigarettes? The same person who sells other illegal substances. Poof, you have now made cigarettes a gateway to cocaine, meth, heroine, and none of it is regulated so deaths from fentanyl just with have easier access to our youth.
Smoking is not good for your health, but we as Americans are free to make that choice for ourselves. I think thatâs the definition of unconstitutional. Banning something like that is only going to make it more widespread and sketchy. Look at the war on drugs and what itâs done, but sure itâll work this time.
I don't think "unconstitutional" is the word you want here. There's endless things you are not free to purchase or choose for yourself.
Not going to argue about whether or not it's constitutional (because I don't know), but I just wanted to point out that this case is slightly more complicated than just "you're not allowed to purchase". It's "you're not allowed to purchase.... BUT other people are". Which means it's potentially a question of discrimination, which is maybe not as cut-and-dry as a "normal" law banning a substance across the board.
The cost of cigs is also artificially inflated in many places. Iâm glad to see less of the younger crowd smoking, thatâs a good thing. But doing it in these ways just feels plain un-American.
We let an awful lot of things that are bad for us slide, because the effects arenât as visible.
Back to the old days of buying smokes out of some guy's trunk.
i hate tobacco too but this is going to backfire just like every other attempt at drug prohibition ever, just you wait.
I wish them luck with that. If someone wants cigarettes theyâll get cigarettes. I bought them under age and when they were over $6 in my city Iâd buy them in other states or duty free or the black market.
I grew up with these types of laws and they are just more of an inconvenience than anything else. My old hometown restricted the sale of beer and wine for many years, but it was easy enough just to go to the next town over. (Simultaneously, the town hosted a state managed liquor store which was extremely weird.)
If smaller communities want to restrict products like that, whatever. Hell, even restricting some services is OK as long as it's not discrimination based.
Personally, I wouldn't live in one of those places. It's not about the tobacco but more about the people who are elected by those communities to make laws like that. If smaller communities of like-minded people want to make their own laws like that, so be it. I wouldn't be like-minded, in that case.
Good ol' Brookline. Bunch of donkeys.
Sad.
Let people put in their bodies what they want.
Really telling how hypocritical most people are. They only support legalizing the drugs they use, and are completely cool with vilifying those who use different drugs.
Good.
Please for the love of God watch this before commenting some dumb shit about "it's my right to expose everyone around me to airborne toxic materials!"
yeah, being exposed to cigarette smoke is not ideal.
my issue with this law is that it feels immensely inconsistent: cars, and guns kill a huge amount of people per year. likely more than cigarettes, but i can't verify that rn. why not put some effort into those problems?
Cigarettes are responsible for about 480,000 deaths per year. Guns related deaths make up just over 48,000. And about 42,000 for vehicle related deaths.
Honestly, I'm quite surprised, I would've guessed that you were correct.
Edit: there is a huge difference though. Most cigarette smokers are self inflicted. As far as second hand smoke, if you can prove damages as a result of it I'm fairly certain you could sue. Enough of that would discourage people from smoking around others without consent. And smoking around your children should be child endangerment.
The things that should be legislated are it's effects on others, but you should be able to whatever you want to yourself.
As the other user pointed out, cigarettes kill far more Americans than cars or guns. Iâm with you on the gun thing. But the car safety stats are always increasing because we do in fact put a huge amount of effort into them - from seat belt laws to firewalls to airbags to automatic braking⌠thereâs too many to name. Now thereâs the recent move of making them bigger, harder to stop, and with reduced visibility, so we might see those gains flatten out in the next half decade or so.
Weâre also going to start to see a decline in cigarette related deaths as fewer and fewer are smoking them these days. Thereâs an intersection of public health messaging, government policies on age of access, taxes, and other efforts that are really starting to pay off. I think the e-cigarettes are also helping, but thatâs a whole discussion of its own.
So cigarette related deaths are still pretty high, but it will start to fall off. I canât remember the exact prediction but letâs just call it falling by half in the next decade. Cigarettes are deadly, but they take a long time to kill.
Smokers born in the 40s and 50s are the ones dying from things like cancer and heart disease today, and the replacement rate (new smokers versus loss from people quitting or dying) isnât working in tobaccoâs favor.
Make smokig illegal in public (been done in many places) but legal in your own home, or at places FOR that purpose.
Like alcohol