When drinking particularly acid drinks, juice, soda, etc., a straw significantly reduces the amount of erosion of your teeth.
“It’s so simple!” -Jim Gaffigan
“Stop it!” -Bob Newhart
“But then only the rich will get to rot their teeth out!” Good, I guess? So what?
“Poor people will still spend money on sugar water! You’ll drive them deeper into poverty!” Then the price isn’t high enough yet. It needs to exceed the cost of the dental and medical work it will precipitate. Which by definition will price many poor people out of sugar water. Which it should.
Easier: track down illegal sugary drinks is easier that track down at what price a drink is illegally sold.
Healthier: forbid those drinks and all the folks forking for that industry will now work for something more useful the the society instead of trying to find ways to convince people to drink their shitty fluid.
I disagree with the legislative approach, but just think of how much cheap/free labor the war on drugs supplies. A war on sugar would keep those numbers up! Good job boys, promotions all around!
In the more boring dystopia, the disincentivization would lead to poor quarterly financials and cause the same movement in the industry. Nobody is pumping out cola at a loss simply because it's their passion project.
Maybe not. But I refuse to believe that you asked that question in good faith, because we're obviously going to have all of them. People should be free to live as healthily or as unhealthily as they choose.
Activities high in negative externalities should be prohibitively expensive to help pay for remediation, and the opposite should be positively reinforced, even subsidized. A stitch, in time, saves nine.
Why? Especially in a country with government-subsidized healthcare?