I get the desire but if it's legal for some then it has to be legal for all adults. This just is untenable in my book. No I don't and never have smoked but life decisions are not made by a nanny state.
The alternatives are either banning it even for people who are currently physically addicted to it, or leaving it legal for everyone forever. Which would you prefer?
The industrialised manufacturing and sale of highly addictive (an important distinction vs alcohol) and highly toxic product that is the source of a wide scale multi decade drain on the public health … yeah I can see why we might want this one banned.
After all no one is bitching that they can’t buy their favourite asbestos insulation anymore.
It will be illegal for all adults eventually. This is just an oddly phrased titled for a ban with grandfathered in exceptions. This isn't a ban for "young people", as there people will eventually be old and it will still be banned.
I am mostly indifferent to cocaine, meth, meph, but I wouldn‘t do them anymore as I consider them highly harmful drugs. G is nice, if I stumble over it. Poppers are nice too, but they make you go blind.
Yet the occasional ecstasy hits I actively do are, as sad as it sounds, the highlights of my life, even knowing it literally melts my brain. And I just love ketamin.
Even more pleasant to me: Benzos and benzolikes. I avoid taking them like the plague they are, but I think about them every single day, probably once every hour. They just feel so damn good and they are then only drug I could ever be addicted to.
Yet even thoughts of nicotine make me feel physically sick in my stomach and throat. I never want to take it again in any form.
I also strongly dislike coffee despite actively trying to start consuming it to become more human and do the "go for a coffee" thing they all love to do.
GHB, a (gay) chemsex staple. It comes in the form of drops you put into water, which makes it easy to overdose. Makes your genitals burn in a good way and makes you want to use them extensively. Naturally, like any drug that provides pleasures beyond our comprehension, it‘s addictive and neurotoxic.
I only did chemsex a few times and long ago, but boy do those memories stick (in a good way, besides the STD).
Those things tend to work well in other countries. USA just did it so badly that they made it worse. New Zealand for example has gone a very long way towards eliminating smoking in their country so far, their laws works.
It seems very close to quality control on alcohol production. Pretty much "you can't sell alcohol with mud in it"... which I assume would be illegal for health reasons already.
Note that this isn't a criminalisation of use but against vending to persons born after the cut-off date.
The War on Some Drugs is widely recognised to be a war-against-some-drug-using-demographics, and has generally omitted or treated far more leniently drugs-of-choice of the rich and powerful (tobacco, alcohol, powdwered cocaine, highly asymmetric prosecution of marijuana, and wink/nod treatments of opiates use by dominant classes) whilst cracking down hard, so to speak, on drugs of the poor and minorities: crack cocaine, meth, black use of heroin (see especially the case of Billy Holiday), and the like. Even grey-market sales of cigarettes have proved lethal if your skin is the wrong colour within the US. Lee Atwater's infamous comments identify this as a deliberate race-based political strategy:
Prohibition in the US was pretty easy to ignore; alcoholic drinks are easy to make, and the government largely didn't take it all that seriously. For all the temperance crusading that got the law passed, it turned out to be unpopular. Did NZ even try it?
Cannabis wasn't banned initially because of any public health crisis (but various health and crime crises were created by banning it). The British studied cannabis use in India in the 1890s and found that it was fairly benign when used in moderation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Hemp_Drugs_Commission
I think it makes sense for people already addicted. If they can't handle dropping smoking and solutions like nicotine patches are not enough, they're at risk of going broke buying more and more expensive illegally imported cigarettes. Essentially this says "we've already allowed you to mess up your body so we're not going to make your addition illegal".
I think if they're banning cigarettes that's fine but why not start where it might make a difference: with people who actually smoke. banning 13 year olds from taking up the habit will have a lot less effect than moving people from smoking to vaping and I don't think there is anyone who legitimately cannot do that.
What do you mean? Tobacco has well known long term adverse health effects and the article mentions "smoke". Whereas vaping (I'm assuming a good brand) has no active substance other than nicotine, which is no more harmful than caffeine which society consumes in copious amounts, and doesn't produce smoke.
This. People naively assume it's the nicotine that is harmful in tobacco. It's really not much more harmful than caffeine. The problem with smoking is the tar. Vapour has zero tar.
Nicotine is associated with considerable adverse effects on cardiovascular health. Caffeine has not been found to have any long-term effects on cardiovascular health.
This is wrong. I don't think you searched, but if you did you probably didn't go very far. What you came up (I'm assuming you did search instead of just parroting what everyone else says) from your search is the result of decades or propaganda to demonize tobacco, and nicotine was simply a practical scape goat to go along with it -- well, for a good demonizing marketing campaign to work I guess you need to manufacture or choose an enemy that is easy to spot.
I'm pretty sure there's no double blind, placebo controlled trial contrasting nicotine with cardiovascular health. Simply because for any adverse health effects to come up, it would need to be taken for a very long time, and no one would run such a study. As for tobacco, well, obviously. But it's not really controlled for nicotine, is it?
> I'm pretty sure there's no double blind, placebo controlled trial contrasting nicotine with cardiovascular health. Simply because for any adverse health effects to come up, it would need to be taken for a very long time, and no one would run such a study.
Sure, but the conclusion "therefore we can't know" is invalid. This is what we have observational studies and animal models for. You can absolutely do this in, say, rhesus monkeys and draw some reasonable conclusions if the trial results match up with observational results in humans.
You're absolutely right. The possibility of animal models didn't even cross my mind when writing the above comment. There probably are such studies. I'll look for them and get better informed.
Not true. There are studies from Sweden where we've got "snus". It's been quite clear for a long time now that that the problem is inhaling smoke from a fire. Which makes a lot of sense when you think about it for a second. Which is why legalizing pot smoking is idiotic, while vaping, cookies, or whatever is a different beast.
The long term side effects of vaping are still very much in the air. The technology is too new to understand how the chemicals will affect lungs over decades. Don't get me wrong, probably still "healthier" than tobacco, but we just don't know yet.
It's been questioned whether that estimate is low, but the frequently cited LD50 for nicotine is 0.8-1 mg/kg, so by that metric a .7 mL Juul pod of pure nicotine would be more than a lethal dose.
I'll admit I'm not well versed on the subject, but I don't think the vapor is just water, correct? Otherwise the pen would need to get insanely hot to turn it into vapor so you can inhale it. I've seen some pretty tiny vape pens. Doesn't make sense.
No, the health issues of smoking are overwhelmingly the result of breathing in (incomplete) combustion side products, which are extremely cancerous and trivially demonstrated to be so in freshman biology experiments.
Commercial nicotine vaping is perhaps 95% less dangerous than smoking (maybe more)[0].
There has been a bizarre crusade against vaping from public health and medical authorities for the last decade. This campaign relies mostly on misleading stats and fear tactics (for example, conflating bootleg THC cartridges using vitamin E acetate with much safer commercially-available nicotine cartridges). Looks like New Zealand saw through that at least.
> There has been a bizarre crusade against vaping from public health and medical authorities for the last decade.
Going from smoking to vaping has a very clear, positive benefit.
There's concern that kids who wouldn't have taken up smoking are taking up vaping, though, which is fairly reasonable. In a perfect world, vaping might be a prescription smoking cessation tool, but in a realistic one it's gonna be impossible to keep it out of non-smokers hands.
Agree, but GP comment implied that smoking and vaping have the same health impact, which they very clearly do not. I assume this is a result of consuming misleading content from trusted sources.
Lying about science is kind of how we got into a lot of the trouble we’re in. I wish public health communicators would knock it off.
I think we're reading that comment very differently; I read it as "the legislative end result", not the health one. That eventually vaping is likely to be similarly banned once there are no tobacco smokers.
> The libertarian ACT Party, which opposed the bill, said many small corner stores, known in New Zealand as dairies, would go out of business because they would no longer be able to sell cigarettes.
I heard a similar argument before smoking was banned in bars and pubs.
I actually do not care about the addictiveness nor toxicity of any of those substances. My opinion comes from my stance that anyone should be able to do whatever they want with their own bodies. That same stance informs my thoughts on trans people, gay people, women's rights, vaccines, abortion etc etc. I see all those issues as an extension of one's right to bodily autonomy.
Humanity has done an insane amount of damage to society since everyone followed along in the "war on drugs", which stemmed from racial origins and continues to have such disproportionate impact. I'm glad we are (slowly) moving away from this atrocity :)
@DalasNoin The solution for Fentanyl and other theoretical substances with higher addictiveness and mortality rates is to make supply a very serious offense, currently a disastrous failure in the USA. The solution with cigarettes is to make them expensive and hard to buy.
Banning things does not work and lulls people into a false sense of security imo.
Guns in the UK are a good example of that.
I’m from the UK and IMO the gun ban is very effective. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone that wasn’t a special armed policeman or a soldier with a gun. It’s very rare for someone to be shot here, and most criminals don’t carry guns because they know the penalties if caught are so much higher that it’s not worth it. Even if you were to held up with a gun (which isn’t common at all), you’d be much less likely to be shot as they wouldn’t have to worry about you shooting them.
"London has halved its gun crime over the past decade"
Gun deaths are half what they were before the handgun ban was introduced. The UK doesn't make 5 year olds practice hiding under desks if there's an "active shooter". It doesn't need to, I don't think any country does apart from th eUS.
As far as I know, fentanyl only really became a problem because it is so potent that it's easy to smuggle. 50x stronger than heroin = you only have to smuggle 1/50th as much to make the same amount of money.
Politicians can decide to pass any laws they want. The ability of the state to enforce those laws is a different matter. Nothing inherent about democracy prevents it from being as restrictive on freedom as a dictatorship.
Heroin abuse is just the symptom of broader problems.
Sure you can't have the population strung out on heroin while effectively juicing them for their productivity but at the same time it's not like a junkie would be living a safe healthy productive life if it weren't for heroin.
What's the alternative? In a liberal democracy do you lock people who use Heroin in a cage instead? That's hardly anymore "liberal".
And if the use isn't illegal you might as well allow it to be legally purchased to reduce the risk of people buying something unpure while promoting criminal drug gangs.
I'm not saying it should be purchasable from a corner shop. But if it's purchasable from a place that can provide support and help for the addict? Sure.
I personally like the idea of fully legalized drugs, but I don't necessarily think they should be allowed to be imported and sold, at least not directly. There's a "middle way" that frames drug use in term of health, but it shouldn't be legal to profit from people's addictions.
This is the right answer. Given the extreme harm of having it illegal (police costs, property theft and damage costs from thieving to pay for it, health costs of having impure illegal adulterated sources, erosion of liberty due to authoritarian ratchet up over time to try and make illegal actually work, etc) I seriously doubt selling all the drugs under a system similar to how most places treat alcohol (maybe with the added health warnings on packaging most places apply to cigarettes) would be more harmful than status quo.
Smoking costs NZ taxpayers an enormous amount for healthcare. I (and probably most people) would rather have fewer smokers so my taxes can be used for more productive things. Individual freedoms are always constrained in various ways for the good of society, and I don't see this as much different.
Sidenote: it's 1am here in NZ, so we may not get a very informed discussion here.
The healthcare cost impact is more complicated. Smokers consume more healthcare at any given age, but die earlier and cost less in healthcare in their lifetime. At the national level the lifetime costs and aging population impact are arguably more important than single year costs.
If the average lifetime increases noticeably there might be consequences on retirement, likely increasing of expense for pensions, and - before or later - an increase in minimum age requirements to access retirement/pension.
Right now - I believe - the set age is 65 years, which is "common" worldwide, but quite a few countries have gone in recent years or are going to 66-67-68 :
Interesting. I seem to recall that for some healthcare systems and tobacco tax regimes, smokers were cheaper for society because they tended not to require such long retirement and palliative care, and they contributed quite a bit more tax, but I don't remember the details or the country now, I might be mistaken. What do New Zealand's numbers look like there?
It's an interesting idea though. Would you think all recreational activities should be regulated under the lens of collectivism? Let's say recreational driving -- to the beach or to the ski slopes or to visit friends in another city, or just a good old fashioned road trip -- is there a case that be prohibited because automobile infrastructure and accidents are an enormous financial cost to society and are also one of the leading causes of death in young people?
Also curious because this will depend a lot on how healthcare is paid for and how accessible is it. I expect NZ for example to do relatively more intervention in those cases than the US. But a quick search is not very informative.
Almost anything you do( hobbies, diet, having children, etc) affects your actuarial healthcare burden, so introducing that as a justification for restrictions opens the door to regulating anything.
Processed meat is a group 1 carcinogen. Are you going to ban that next? Wait so is sunshine. Are you going to ban sunbathing?
I see this line or argumentation a lot but never a real analysis of why it should be applied in this case. The reality is that people just identify something they want to change and rummage around for a justification and healthcare burden is convenient.
I'm no fan of smoking and think the world would be a lot better without it but this type of argument is not valid in most cases without a much stronger justification.
> Processed meat is a group 1 carcinogen. Are you going to ban that next? Wait so is sunshine. Are you going to ban sunbathing?
This is exactly what the proponents of these kind of laws want. It's all about control. There is a pop appeal that gets taken up by useful idiots - "rah rah they take our take dollars" - much like the border wall folks might try and blame x,y,z on illegal immigrants to get they ideology pushed through.
In most countries, it's not clear if smokers use more health care than average. They do get sick more, but they also die sooner and more quickly. But let's assume it's true, and that smokers do cause an undue burden on the health care system, and therefore smoking should be banned. Why not apply the same argument to obesity?
Obese people definitely cause an undue burden on the health care system. Why not tax them more, or force them to diet and exercise? It would be very cost-effective, allowing taxes to be used for more productive things. And as you said, individual freedoms are always constrained in various ways for the good of society. I don't see this as much different.
Nah, this policy rocks. No one who is already addicted to smoking will suffer as they ratchet the age so that existing smokers can continue to smoke. If you really want to try/start you can bloody well learn to cultivate it yourself and no one can stop you. It was signed, sealed and delivered within a liberal democracy. Kiwi here.
New Zealand is not a liberal democracy. It restricts freedom of information. New Zealand has banned over 1,300 books, and restricted access to another 728. The country also bans certain video games, and even the second Human Centipede film. New Zealand also blocks its citizens from opening TCP connections to certain IP addresses, as they deem the sites so dangerous that visiting them for any reason (even research) could be harmful to society.
Somehow other countries do fine without these restrictions.
Not op, but the fact that they are expanding MAID(euthanasia) to non terminal patients and people in general. They had a case where a Soldier called the I believe the VA for PTSD and was offered euthanasia as an option. Then there was a Paralympian who was asking for a ramp to be put at her house, they couldn't do that but they offered her MAID as an option.
They also plan to loosen the reqs to allow mentally handicapped people to apply.
Health Canada says that starting March 17 next year, “people with a mental illness as their sole underlying medical condition will have access to MAID if they meet all of the eligibility requirements and the practitioners fulfill the safeguards that are put in place for this group of people.”
Hmm I understand why you feel the way you do actually, even though I currently support people being able to end their lives humanely whenever they want. I'm someone who has mental health issues myself, so I can see why having easier access to suicide is a bit weird. A good argument on why MAID leads us further down the dystopian road could easily change my mind I think...
That's a good one. Definitely soured my opinion of Canadians who supported such a thing. Seems as though humans just never expect such things to affect them if they consider themselves "good citizens", up until the point that the microscope is aimed at them. Makes me sad that many people here seem to take for granted that the good life they live is not a given. I'm Trinidadian and while I've lived here for almost 10 years, I'm extremely aware of how government corruption can affect a country in a deep and near irreversible manner...
Please find the evidence of taking over the capital. That website has every livestream mapped, timestamped etc so you can often look at multiple livestreams for any given time at multiple different spots. I see zero evidence supporting your claim. I do however see people protesting, at least one bouncy castle and lanes purposefully kept open for emergency traffic nearly all the time. You can just link the stream and timestamp url here when you find it.
What about vaping? if it is still OK, then it is not just the drug (nicotine) they are worried about, but the health effects.
Ok then, next ban alcohol please, then junk food. Are these less of a public health issue? I suppose they are just still socially more accepted, that is all. Isn’t this what laws are anyway, social constructs?
Well yes of course. Social acceptability is in fact super important for doing anything in a democracy. Women voting, gay marriage, are other examples of things which at one point were not socially acceptable, even though they violated the stated goals of liberal democracy, but eventually and over time became social acceptable and ingrained into law. This is just how it works.
Yes, It is. The issue is that this acceptability is more often the result of propaganda (in the general sense of influencing public opinion.) than scientific/logical diligent public discourse.
Yeah, I know. As you already said too, "This is just how it works."
I mean, if we're talking about propaganda, we probably need to include decades of the tobacco industry pushing it in movies, advertisements, denial (including under oath in Congress) of the health impacts, etc.
We do. The problem is that tobacco is often singled out. It is the easy target. What about the food industry ? [1] (yes again.)
We need to attack other harmful products with a proportional acharnement to that we applied to tobacco. That was my first aim in all this (downvoted) affair.
> If you are banning cigarettes because of their health effects, then why not regulate other similarly devastating products?
Or processes? Like maybe incomplete burning of stuff. Wood smoke from campfire is quite similar to tobacco smoke. And has quite the same carcinogenic effects. Maybe banning campfires would make sense and same applies to poorly burning fireplaces.
I get the desire but if it's legal for some then it has to be legal for all adults. This just is untenable in my book. No I don't and never have smoked but life decisions are not made by a nanny state.
The alternatives are either banning it even for people who are currently physically addicted to it, or leaving it legal for everyone forever. Which would you prefer?
Why should it be illegal?
The industrialised manufacturing and sale of highly addictive (an important distinction vs alcohol) and highly toxic product that is the source of a wide scale multi decade drain on the public health … yeah I can see why we might want this one banned.
After all no one is bitching that they can’t buy their favourite asbestos insulation anymore.
Hmm, let's see if drug prohibition has been tried anywhere and how successful it was...oh.
It will be illegal for all adults eventually. This is just an oddly phrased titled for a ban with grandfathered in exceptions. This isn't a ban for "young people", as there people will eventually be old and it will still be banned.
I've tried most drugs it's humanly possible to do, except heroin and its derivatives.
Cigarettes are the only thing I still get a craving for if I see someone smoking.
That, and coffee. Probably the two most practically addictive things I've ever done.
I am mostly indifferent to cocaine, meth, meph, but I wouldn‘t do them anymore as I consider them highly harmful drugs. G is nice, if I stumble over it. Poppers are nice too, but they make you go blind.
Yet the occasional ecstasy hits I actively do are, as sad as it sounds, the highlights of my life, even knowing it literally melts my brain. And I just love ketamin.
Even more pleasant to me: Benzos and benzolikes. I avoid taking them like the plague they are, but I think about them every single day, probably once every hour. They just feel so damn good and they are then only drug I could ever be addicted to.
Yet even thoughts of nicotine make me feel physically sick in my stomach and throat. I never want to take it again in any form.
I also strongly dislike coffee despite actively trying to start consuming it to become more human and do the "go for a coffee" thing they all love to do.
Everyone is different!
> G is nice,
What's G?
> do the "go for a coffee" thing they all love to do.
Most places these days do chai / chai lattes. It's a perfect social coffee-substitute for me.
> What's G?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-Hydroxybutyric_acid
GHB, a (gay) chemsex staple. It comes in the form of drops you put into water, which makes it easy to overdose. Makes your genitals burn in a good way and makes you want to use them extensively. Naturally, like any drug that provides pleasures beyond our comprehension, it‘s addictive and neurotoxic.
I only did chemsex a few times and long ago, but boy do those memories stick (in a good way, besides the STD).
Who here thinks either Prohibition or the War on Drugs has been good for society?
Those things tend to work well in other countries. USA just did it so badly that they made it worse. New Zealand for example has gone a very long way towards eliminating smoking in their country so far, their laws works.
People whose livelihoods depend on such policies existing, I imagine.
I do. Not for society as a whole but for some, selected, societies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones
Prohibition wasnt quite the abject failure it was made out to be: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibit...
I was going to say the same, but vaping and other nicotine replacement is still legal.
It’s basically trying to push people to “less harmful” forms of nicotine.
But yeah, no doubt there will be a black market for real cigarettes, especially when they are still legal for people over a certain age.
It seems very close to quality control on alcohol production. Pretty much "you can't sell alcohol with mud in it"... which I assume would be illegal for health reasons already.
Note that this isn't a criminalisation of use but against vending to persons born after the cut-off date.
The War on Some Drugs is widely recognised to be a war-against-some-drug-using-demographics, and has generally omitted or treated far more leniently drugs-of-choice of the rich and powerful (tobacco, alcohol, powdwered cocaine, highly asymmetric prosecution of marijuana, and wink/nod treatments of opiates use by dominant classes) whilst cracking down hard, so to speak, on drugs of the poor and minorities: crack cocaine, meth, black use of heroin (see especially the case of Billy Holiday), and the like. Even grey-market sales of cigarettes have proved lethal if your skin is the wrong colour within the US. Lee Atwater's infamous comments identify this as a deliberate race-based political strategy:
<https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...>
How long until everybody decides marijuana is a public health crisis again but some other drug is perfectly fine? 40 or 50 years?
Ethanol has been perfectly fine since prohibition ended...
What's the definition of "perfectly fine"?
"there hasn't been a significant effort to re-ban it wholesale at a state or federal level"?
At least in the context of the original parent comment ("doing perfectly fine since prohibition")
Prohibition in the US was pretty easy to ignore; alcoholic drinks are easy to make, and the government largely didn't take it all that seriously. For all the temperance crusading that got the law passed, it turned out to be unpopular. Did NZ even try it?
Cannabis wasn't banned initially because of any public health crisis (but various health and crime crises were created by banning it). The British studied cannabis use in India in the 1890s and found that it was fairly benign when used in moderation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Hemp_Drugs_Commission
Next, in the line: make coffee illegal.
Banning them in favour of vaping seems smart.
Doing so with an arbitrary cut off seems irrational.
it’s very clearly not irrational from a practical political perspective
What would be the process for choosing a non-arbitrary cut-off?
I think it makes sense for people already addicted. If they can't handle dropping smoking and solutions like nicotine patches are not enough, they're at risk of going broke buying more and more expensive illegally imported cigarettes. Essentially this says "we've already allowed you to mess up your body so we're not going to make your addition illegal".
If you already smoke, just move to vapes...
There's still people who try vapes and go back to smoking. Or do both and increase the nicotine intake https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/cigarette-smokers-trying-to-... It doesn't seem to be something everyone can just do.
Do they go back to smoking because they're physically unable to use a vape or just because of habit/style/supply etc?
No idea, sorry. I knew of one case so checked if it's more common. But i don't know anything about their motivation.
Sorry, my question was quite blunt...
I think if they're banning cigarettes that's fine but why not start where it might make a difference: with people who actually smoke. banning 13 year olds from taking up the habit will have a lot less effect than moving people from smoking to vaping and I don't think there is anyone who legitimately cannot do that.
> The law does not affect vaping, which has already become more popular than smoking in New Zealand.
Isn't the end result the same for vaping?
What do you mean? Tobacco has well known long term adverse health effects and the article mentions "smoke". Whereas vaping (I'm assuming a good brand) has no active substance other than nicotine, which is no more harmful than caffeine which society consumes in copious amounts, and doesn't produce smoke.
This. People naively assume it's the nicotine that is harmful in tobacco. It's really not much more harmful than caffeine. The problem with smoking is the tar. Vapour has zero tar.
Nicotine is associated with considerable adverse effects on cardiovascular health. Caffeine has not been found to have any long-term effects on cardiovascular health.
This is wrong. I don't think you searched, but if you did you probably didn't go very far. What you came up (I'm assuming you did search instead of just parroting what everyone else says) from your search is the result of decades or propaganda to demonize tobacco, and nicotine was simply a practical scape goat to go along with it -- well, for a good demonizing marketing campaign to work I guess you need to manufacture or choose an enemy that is easy to spot.
I'm pretty sure there's no double blind, placebo controlled trial contrasting nicotine with cardiovascular health. Simply because for any adverse health effects to come up, it would need to be taken for a very long time, and no one would run such a study. As for tobacco, well, obviously. But it's not really controlled for nicotine, is it?
> I'm pretty sure there's no double blind, placebo controlled trial contrasting nicotine with cardiovascular health. Simply because for any adverse health effects to come up, it would need to be taken for a very long time, and no one would run such a study.
Sure, but the conclusion "therefore we can't know" is invalid. This is what we have observational studies and animal models for. You can absolutely do this in, say, rhesus monkeys and draw some reasonable conclusions if the trial results match up with observational results in humans.
You're absolutely right. The possibility of animal models didn't even cross my mind when writing the above comment. There probably are such studies. I'll look for them and get better informed.
Not true. There are studies from Sweden where we've got "snus". It's been quite clear for a long time now that that the problem is inhaling smoke from a fire. Which makes a lot of sense when you think about it for a second. Which is why legalizing pot smoking is idiotic, while vaping, cookies, or whatever is a different beast.
The long term side effects of vaping are still very much in the air. The technology is too new to understand how the chemicals will affect lungs over decades. Don't get me wrong, probably still "healthier" than tobacco, but we just don't know yet.
I did specify a vape that has no active substance other than nicotine. So you can pretty much rule out the "chemicals".
Does such a vape exist? One with 100% pure, nothing-else nicotine? No propylene glycol or glycerine?
It's been questioned whether that estimate is low, but the frequently cited LD50 for nicotine is 0.8-1 mg/kg, so by that metric a .7 mL Juul pod of pure nicotine would be more than a lethal dose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_poisoning
I'll admit I'm not well versed on the subject, but I don't think the vapor is just water, correct? Otherwise the pen would need to get insanely hot to turn it into vapor so you can inhale it. I've seen some pretty tiny vape pens. Doesn't make sense.
No, the health issues of smoking are overwhelmingly the result of breathing in (incomplete) combustion side products, which are extremely cancerous and trivially demonstrated to be so in freshman biology experiments.
Commercial nicotine vaping is perhaps 95% less dangerous than smoking (maybe more)[0].
There has been a bizarre crusade against vaping from public health and medical authorities for the last decade. This campaign relies mostly on misleading stats and fear tactics (for example, conflating bootleg THC cartridges using vitamin E acetate with much safer commercially-available nicotine cartridges). Looks like New Zealand saw through that at least.
[0]: https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/projects/outputs/nicotine-withou...
> There has been a bizarre crusade against vaping from public health and medical authorities for the last decade.
Going from smoking to vaping has a very clear, positive benefit.
There's concern that kids who wouldn't have taken up smoking are taking up vaping, though, which is fairly reasonable. In a perfect world, vaping might be a prescription smoking cessation tool, but in a realistic one it's gonna be impossible to keep it out of non-smokers hands.
Agree, but GP comment implied that smoking and vaping have the same health impact, which they very clearly do not. I assume this is a result of consuming misleading content from trusted sources.
Lying about science is kind of how we got into a lot of the trouble we’re in. I wish public health communicators would knock it off.
I think we're reading that comment very differently; I read it as "the legislative end result", not the health one. That eventually vaping is likely to be similarly banned once there are no tobacco smokers.
> The libertarian ACT Party, which opposed the bill, said many small corner stores, known in New Zealand as dairies, would go out of business because they would no longer be able to sell cigarettes.
I heard a similar argument before smoking was banned in bars and pubs.
Didn't happen.
Besides, if their shop's existence depends on selling dangerous products to addicts, they should be put out of business.
The idea of a ban like this has been floating around in NZ politics for years; the first version of it I heard had the cut-off birth year as 2000.
Much as I hate smoking and cigarette smoke, this politically flies in the face of free will in a liberal democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_New_Zealand
So you think that everyone in a liberal democracy should be able to buy Heroin?
I think the War on Drugs has devastated the US to little effect considering how many die of opiate overdose every year.
I’m trying to figure out if you’re even serious to suggest banning heroin worked when fentanyl is the leading cause of Millennials dying.
By default, adults should be allowed to buy heroin.
Every adult, certainly.
How about fentanyl and how about other theoretical substances with higher addictiveness and mortality rates?
I actually do not care about the addictiveness nor toxicity of any of those substances. My opinion comes from my stance that anyone should be able to do whatever they want with their own bodies. That same stance informs my thoughts on trans people, gay people, women's rights, vaccines, abortion etc etc. I see all those issues as an extension of one's right to bodily autonomy.
Humanity has done an insane amount of damage to society since everyone followed along in the "war on drugs", which stemmed from racial origins and continues to have such disproportionate impact. I'm glad we are (slowly) moving away from this atrocity :)
@DalasNoin The solution for Fentanyl and other theoretical substances with higher addictiveness and mortality rates is to make supply a very serious offense, currently a disastrous failure in the USA. The solution with cigarettes is to make them expensive and hard to buy.
Banning things does not work and lulls people into a false sense of security imo. Guns in the UK are a good example of that.
I’m from the UK and IMO the gun ban is very effective. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone that wasn’t a special armed policeman or a soldier with a gun. It’s very rare for someone to be shot here, and most criminals don’t carry guns because they know the penalties if caught are so much higher that it’s not worth it. Even if you were to held up with a gun (which isn’t common at all), you’d be much less likely to be shot as they wouldn’t have to worry about you shooting them.
Plenty of people have guns, but gun crime has certainly dropped dramatically since the days of Dunblane
https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/192/total_nu...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/01/gun-rising-i...
Criminals using illegal guns don't adhere to laws. Same issue in US.
"London has halved its gun crime over the past decade"
Gun deaths are half what they were before the handgun ban was introduced. The UK doesn't make 5 year olds practice hiding under desks if there's an "active shooter". It doesn't need to, I don't think any country does apart from th eUS.
As far as I know, fentanyl only really became a problem because it is so potent that it's easy to smuggle. 50x stronger than heroin = you only have to smuggle 1/50th as much to make the same amount of money.
> So you think that everyone in a liberal democracy should be able to buy Heroin?
Of course not. Only the choosen ones. Is New Zeeland still a democracy ?
Politicians can decide to pass any laws they want. The ability of the state to enforce those laws is a different matter. Nothing inherent about democracy prevents it from being as restrictive on freedom as a dictatorship.
Heroin abuse is just the symptom of broader problems.
Sure you can't have the population strung out on heroin while effectively juicing them for their productivity but at the same time it's not like a junkie would be living a safe healthy productive life if it weren't for heroin.
What's the alternative? In a liberal democracy do you lock people who use Heroin in a cage instead? That's hardly anymore "liberal".
And if the use isn't illegal you might as well allow it to be legally purchased to reduce the risk of people buying something unpure while promoting criminal drug gangs.
I'm not saying it should be purchasable from a corner shop. But if it's purchasable from a place that can provide support and help for the addict? Sure.
Yes, every person of voting age.
Yes absolutely, and all other so called "hard" drugs.
Or on other hand maybe we should ban ethanol too and treat it exactly like heroine. After all the damage and costs to society are pretty similar.
Could you provide a list of liberal democracies then please?
"Liberal Democracy" is not the same as "Libertarian Paradise"
I personally like the idea of fully legalized drugs, but I don't necessarily think they should be allowed to be imported and sold, at least not directly. There's a "middle way" that frames drug use in term of health, but it shouldn't be legal to profit from people's addictions.
Just adults. Why not?
This is the right answer. Given the extreme harm of having it illegal (police costs, property theft and damage costs from thieving to pay for it, health costs of having impure illegal adulterated sources, erosion of liberty due to authoritarian ratchet up over time to try and make illegal actually work, etc) I seriously doubt selling all the drugs under a system similar to how most places treat alcohol (maybe with the added health warnings on packaging most places apply to cigarettes) would be more harmful than status quo.
Smoking costs NZ taxpayers an enormous amount for healthcare. I (and probably most people) would rather have fewer smokers so my taxes can be used for more productive things. Individual freedoms are always constrained in various ways for the good of society, and I don't see this as much different.
Sidenote: it's 1am here in NZ, so we may not get a very informed discussion here.
you should probably make it illegal to be unhealthy in any way...
Slippery slope argument, so easy.
That is close to what they are doing, for example they deport people for being fat.
https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/new-zealands-solution-ris...
The healthcare cost impact is more complicated. Smokers consume more healthcare at any given age, but die earlier and cost less in healthcare in their lifetime. At the national level the lifetime costs and aging population impact are arguably more important than single year costs.
NEJM[https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199710093371506]
If the average lifetime increases noticeably there might be consequences on retirement, likely increasing of expense for pensions, and - before or later - an increase in minimum age requirements to access retirement/pension.
Right now - I believe - the set age is 65 years, which is "common" worldwide, but quite a few countries have gone in recent years or are going to 66-67-68 :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_age
Agree, even more reason to discount the "taxpayers are paying for smokers choices" reaction
Interesting. I seem to recall that for some healthcare systems and tobacco tax regimes, smokers were cheaper for society because they tended not to require such long retirement and palliative care, and they contributed quite a bit more tax, but I don't remember the details or the country now, I might be mistaken. What do New Zealand's numbers look like there?
It's an interesting idea though. Would you think all recreational activities should be regulated under the lens of collectivism? Let's say recreational driving -- to the beach or to the ski slopes or to visit friends in another city, or just a good old fashioned road trip -- is there a case that be prohibited because automobile infrastructure and accidents are an enormous financial cost to society and are also one of the leading causes of death in young people?
> What do New Zealand's numbers look like there?
Also curious because this will depend a lot on how healthcare is paid for and how accessible is it. I expect NZ for example to do relatively more intervention in those cases than the US. But a quick search is not very informative.
I can’t wait for the fat person tax!
Almost anything you do( hobbies, diet, having children, etc) affects your actuarial healthcare burden, so introducing that as a justification for restrictions opens the door to regulating anything.
Processed meat is a group 1 carcinogen. Are you going to ban that next? Wait so is sunshine. Are you going to ban sunbathing?
I see this line or argumentation a lot but never a real analysis of why it should be applied in this case. The reality is that people just identify something they want to change and rummage around for a justification and healthcare burden is convenient.
I'm no fan of smoking and think the world would be a lot better without it but this type of argument is not valid in most cases without a much stronger justification.
> Processed meat is a group 1 carcinogen. Are you going to ban that next? Wait so is sunshine. Are you going to ban sunbathing?
This is exactly what the proponents of these kind of laws want. It's all about control. There is a pop appeal that gets taken up by useful idiots - "rah rah they take our take dollars" - much like the border wall folks might try and blame x,y,z on illegal immigrants to get they ideology pushed through.
Does it actually cost taxpayers?
In Europe most countries tax cigarettes so much that they actually collect more in tax than smoking costs the healthcare system.
Either way, that's not an argument to ban but rather to increase tax or more general to make smokers bear the cost of related healthcare.
In most countries, it's not clear if smokers use more health care than average. They do get sick more, but they also die sooner and more quickly. But let's assume it's true, and that smokers do cause an undue burden on the health care system, and therefore smoking should be banned. Why not apply the same argument to obesity?
Obese people definitely cause an undue burden on the health care system. Why not tax them more, or force them to diet and exercise? It would be very cost-effective, allowing taxes to be used for more productive things. And as you said, individual freedoms are always constrained in various ways for the good of society. I don't see this as much different.
Nah, this policy rocks. No one who is already addicted to smoking will suffer as they ratchet the age so that existing smokers can continue to smoke. If you really want to try/start you can bloody well learn to cultivate it yourself and no one can stop you. It was signed, sealed and delivered within a liberal democracy. Kiwi here.
New Zealand is not a liberal democracy. It restricts freedom of information. New Zealand has banned over 1,300 books, and restricted access to another 728. The country also bans certain video games, and even the second Human Centipede film. New Zealand also blocks its citizens from opening TCP connections to certain IP addresses, as they deem the sites so dangerous that visiting them for any reason (even research) could be harmful to society.
Somehow other countries do fine without these restrictions.
NZ is in a race to the bottom with Canada, with the winner being able to claim the mantle of ultimate liberal dystopia
How so? What has Canada done to race New Zealand to a dystopia? There's probably a lot, but I'm curious as to what you think specifically
Not op, but the fact that they are expanding MAID(euthanasia) to non terminal patients and people in general. They had a case where a Soldier called the I believe the VA for PTSD and was offered euthanasia as an option. Then there was a Paralympian who was asking for a ramp to be put at her house, they couldn't do that but they offered her MAID as an option. They also plan to loosen the reqs to allow mentally handicapped people to apply.
Health Canada says that starting March 17 next year, “people with a mental illness as their sole underlying medical condition will have access to MAID if they meet all of the eligibility requirements and the practitioners fulfill the safeguards that are put in place for this group of people.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/christine-...
https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/military-veteran-offe...
Hmm I understand why you feel the way you do actually, even though I currently support people being able to end their lives humanely whenever they want. I'm someone who has mental health issues myself, so I can see why having easier access to suicide is a bit weird. A good argument on why MAID leads us further down the dystopian road could easily change my mind I think...
Targetting/locking bank accounts of people protesting against one of the most authoritarian COVID restrictions in the world?
That's a good one. Definitely soured my opinion of Canadians who supported such a thing. Seems as though humans just never expect such things to affect them if they consider themselves "good citizens", up until the point that the microscope is aimed at them. Makes me sad that many people here seem to take for granted that the good life they live is not a given. I'm Trinidadian and while I've lived here for almost 10 years, I'm extremely aware of how government corruption can affect a country in a deep and near irreversible manner...
I still prefer smoking ban over locking my bank account.
If you can resist the urge to try and take over the capital city, then you can have smoke and an unlocked bank account in Canada.
I still prefer smoking ban over freedom to roam and protest against fascist/oppressive government.
Full disclosure: I am not smoker.
https://www.convoylive.com/
Please find the evidence of taking over the capital. That website has every livestream mapped, timestamped etc so you can often look at multiple livestreams for any given time at multiple different spots. I see zero evidence supporting your claim. I do however see people protesting, at least one bouncy castle and lanes purposefully kept open for emergency traffic nearly all the time. You can just link the stream and timestamp url here when you find it.
All those videos are evidence of that. What else do you want?
No freedom for you! Next!
What about vaping? if it is still OK, then it is not just the drug (nicotine) they are worried about, but the health effects.
Ok then, next ban alcohol please, then junk food. Are these less of a public health issue? I suppose they are just still socially more accepted, that is all. Isn’t this what laws are anyway, social constructs?
I’m having trouble parsing this. Are you arguing doing this for the health reasons is bad versus just a dislike of nicotine itself?
I'm saying:
if you are banning cigarettes because of their addictive effects. Then you should ban every nicotine-based product.
If you are banning cigarettes because of their health effects, then why not regulate other similarly devastating products?
Then I reasoned that law can only do what is socially accepted. Banning cigarette is socially accepted, so they decided to do it.
In the end, it is about social acceptability first, not just addiction or health effects.
Couldn't the ban reasonably be about the combined set of factors?
It's addictive, very damaging to health, and highly negative socially, in a way that vaping and alcohol don't match.
Ok that is a better argument.
vaping? I agree.
Alcohol? less so. it is debatable, but I’m not an expert, so I will leave the details for someone else.
Junk food? This is the underrated one. In 100 years (I hope earlier), I bet this will be the first on the list
Well yes of course. Social acceptability is in fact super important for doing anything in a democracy. Women voting, gay marriage, are other examples of things which at one point were not socially acceptable, even though they violated the stated goals of liberal democracy, but eventually and over time became social acceptable and ingrained into law. This is just how it works.
> Social acceptability is in fact super important
Yes, It is. The issue is that this acceptability is more often the result of propaganda (in the general sense of influencing public opinion.) than scientific/logical diligent public discourse.
Yeah, I know. As you already said too, "This is just how it works."
I mean, if we're talking about propaganda, we probably need to include decades of the tobacco industry pushing it in movies, advertisements, denial (including under oath in Congress) of the health impacts, etc.
We do. The problem is that tobacco is often singled out. It is the easy target. What about the food industry ? [1] (yes again.)
We need to attack other harmful products with a proportional acharnement to that we applied to tobacco. That was my first aim in all this (downvoted) affair.
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/sugar/big-fat-lies-sugar-p...
> If you are banning cigarettes because of their health effects, then why not regulate other similarly devastating products?
Or processes? Like maybe incomplete burning of stuff. Wood smoke from campfire is quite similar to tobacco smoke. And has quite the same carcinogenic effects. Maybe banning campfires would make sense and same applies to poorly burning fireplaces.
Exactly ! I was referring to alcohol and junk food, but your point is even more related to cigarettes. The smoke, or course.
And now that I think about it, isn’t "pollution" in general a kind of smoke too? We are certainly not doing enough on this issue too.
Cigarettes are bad for your lung health over and above the presence of nicotine.
Of course ! you are not following my argument. I guess I crammed it too much.