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Comment by TheRealPomax | Hacker News Reader

Looking forward to the day where the rest of Not-New-Zealand goes "actually, yeah, let's just ban this nonsense, this industry does not need to exist", and then have that industry cease to exist over the course of a, really too generous, "only existing addicts can buy your product" period.

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Why? Like I get that it’s a nuisance when other people don’t have a choice but be forced to be around it which makes restaurant and workplace bans make sense, can’t you let people make their own choices though?

I like to smoke very occasionally and am not at all addicted, a lot of people are like this. Way too little to have meaningful effect sizes on long term health.

Time to read up on how NZ implemented it. Already smoke, even if incidentally? You're 100% unaffected, you can still buy them until you die from old age. Too young? Cool, you're never going to get ciggies sold to you, and you're not going to miss suddenly no longer have access to them because you never did anyway. No one loses. It's a very long term solution, and one that (the current forms of) the US or Europe could never pass.

What happens to immigrants or tourists? Is vaping included? I don't smoke but am curious about how this type of phase out system works.

Why should anyone care? Let them tough it out.

I imagine industries that depend on tourism would care, if a decent chunk of potential tourists are smokers. I personally would prefer if there were no smokers (I have asthma), but I could understand that tourism-focused industries would be concerned about turning off groups of tourists that include at least one smoker.

New Zealand is an ecotourism destination, officially and explicitly marketed as such. If anything, banning smoking would increase the perceived quality of their stay for anyone in that segment.

I still remember the ad campaigns from the 90s.

"I saw a girl walking down the street and I was like yeaaaahh and then i saw her light up a cigarette and I was like nah.... smoking usn't sixy"

There are a lot of people who insist that prohibition never works. I wonder if this is successful it will change their minds.

I think there’s some nuance here. You can’t totally prohibit something people really want to do, but you can pretty effectively prohibit something almost no one wants to do or where there is a very good substitute.

Having a tiny landmass, and no land borders also helps. It’s possible to grown tobacco hydroponically but I’m not sure if anyone would bother unless there was an overnight hard ban.

That's a reasonable line of thought, but NZ already has a fairly robust black market for tobacco products: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/12/17/new-zealands-pl...

> a tenth of the tobacco consumed in 2019 in New Zealand was illicit.

which is broadly similar to the US market, if admittedly on the low end: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/19016/understandin...

> the portion of the total U.S. tobacco market represented by illicit sales has grown in recent years and is now between 8.5 percent and 21 percent

I think a lot of people underestimate how difficult combating smuggling is, even with a tiny landmass and no land borders. Nobody's checking every container, much less package.

That’s very true, and I wouldn’t claim it could be 100% effective. Even East Germany had rock albums smuggled in.

Nicotine is still available to the younger generation in the form of vapes. It isn't a strict prohibition, it's an effort at harm reduction by turning people away from the worst method of ingestion. And, yeah, time will tell.

It will not.

They will see the microscopically minuscule number of people who still smoke due to the black market and claim the entire effort to be an abject failure.

They will ignore the millennia of higher quality lifespan added to the population, the massive savings in public healthcare expenses, and the almost-non-existent second hand damage smoking does and just focus on the thousand or so people smoking smuggled cigarettes.

When you suggest that their position is somewhat analogous to not passing laws against murder because "well that dude over there got murdered so OBVIOUSLY the laws aren't not working" they will just look at you funny.

Thank goodness. I don't want to ever model the US after some captive remote island social experiment in the southern pacific.

Are tourists able to purchase Tabacco?

That is missing the point of letting people make their own choices.

Before we let people make choices about smoking, I'd rather let them do heroin or cocaine. At least that does not force me to inhale their smoke. But as a more general answer, we (as society) always make trade-offs with letting people make their own choices, and forbidding behavior for the better of society. The boundaries will always be somewhat arbitrary.

That said, the economic costs of smoking to society is significant and there are some corporations that essentially make a killing on it (don't get me started on the anti-science propaganda that they funded. If people want to smoke tobacco in their own home, sure let them grow their own, so at least there is not a corporation who tries to peddle smoking to children in order to improve their profits.

I'm glad I got that choice of breathing my dads secondhand smoke growing up!

Um...

he made that choice for you. children have choices made for them in droves.

children rarely have the ability -- or are given the opportunity -- to make choices for themselves.

Not a lot of infants going around asking for circumcisions and ear-piercings, but...

> Not a lot of infants going around asking for circumcisions and ear-piercings, but...

Those are wrong too, what's your point?

Not really, it feels like you forgot the distinction between personal choice, where the decision affects only you, and group choice, where a decision is made for, and affects everyone in a group. Smoking falls in that second category, so it's not just your decision to make, the entire group gets to weigh in. So they did. Democracy works, even if (especially if) you don't like the result.

We can't even stop methamphetamine or main street money laundering, this cigarette ban is not going to be effective.

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