Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

On a personal level I would not really appreciate something that encourages more smoking (Everywhere I go I have to deal with other people's smoking, it's noxious and I don't see a good argument to letting people smoke in places like public parks or walking along sidewalks, yet it happens all the time).

But on the more business-y level, this does seem interesting. Ideally, there's a big potential market for people bumming cigarettes , especially in crowded areas. But I see two major problems:

- In crowded areas, how do you identify who the seller/buyer is ? There's a contacting issue (maybe face pics could solve this).

- As mentioned by gedrap, you'd need a pretty big density for this. People aren't willing to cross town to get a cig like they would to pick up free cupboards.

Honestly, a better solution for this would probably be a sort of dispensary where you could just deposit cigs somewhere and people could buy them. Or just cut out the user-aspect, and make a single-cigarette dispensary. That would avoid quality problems. Unfortunately this solution isn't necessarily "interesting", but it's probably the most "correct".

> make a single-cigarette dispensary

.. or sell them in the same places packs get sold, whether that's shops or bars or machines or wherever.

That's not legal in the UK, where people buying single cigs tend to be children.

Didn't know that - shame really, under-age smoking should be combated by enforcing ID checking.

In theory, it is enforced by ID checking. In theory.

We tend to use a combination of measures.

18 is the legal minimum age to buy cigs (recently raised from 16) and shops should be checking ID. Ideally they check if they think the purchaser is under 21.

We combine that with other stuff - advertising bans, placement restrictions inside shops, quantities sold, eye-watering tax levels, etc.

Some of these are counter productive. The high tax rate means many cigs are smuggled into the country. And this is a route for counterfeit product. Legal cigs are harmful enough, but some of the counterfeit product is worse, contaminated with a variety of weird stuff.

Banning smoking in public buildings (something I'm in favour of) means a few people smoke in their cars, but with their children in the car too. That's pretty bad. Many children are admitted to hospital because their parents smoke, and so increasing the tobacco smoke that children are exposed to feels like a bad idea.

I'm generally tolerant of government regulation, but we have too much in the UK.

single cigarette dispensers could be smaller and wall mounted, wherever.

Not a huge amount smaller than machines selling packs of cigarettes, which already can exist pretty much anywhere (where laws permit).

That's a very common practice here in Brazil. In my region we call it "Cigarro picado" (sliced cigarette).

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