Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed

Alcohol is heavily restricted, though. You can't sell it to minors, younger minors can't drink it in public, you can't sell/buy/make it above a certain proof, you can only resell it from authorized distributors, it is taxes, and so on.

Sure, banning cigarettes for a specific generation is a much more stringent restriction, but plenty of other restrictions exist.

You must live in a democracy. If you ever lived in a country where the government curtailed freedoms by fiat, you'd understand that it can and it will. I happened to be living in Vietnam when the government just randomly decided one day that smoking would be banned everywhere, effective immediately. You might think that's simply putting a thumb on the scale; but you also haven't tried to visit the New York Times website from there and later found yourself in a room with officials asking for all your passwords. And clearly you're not familiar with the preferred way of clearing traffic jams, which is driving a jeep through a crowd of motorbikes while a guy with a long bamboo cane whacks anyone who's in the way.

Thumb on the scale my ass. Totalitarianism is control over the little things.

But putting that aside, if a citizen supports banning cigarettes for people born after a certain date, but not alcohol, that certainly seems hypocritical to me.

Beyond whether something is "bad for you", the key aspect in a free society is whether the State should decide for you (we're entrusted with the right to vote, after all).

Demolition Man has turned out to be the most accurate prediction of the future regarding those issues among all the 90s movies. Quite interesting.

Given the massive cost smoking imposes on the health sector, I find it hard to believe that's remotely possible.

I assume all the ones who were young enough to have worked tobacco at its peak are now working for Meta, OpenAI or Flutter.

Not to say lobbyists don’t have an effect in the UK, they do. But the US has a particularly egregious setup.

As we know, smoking can cause lots of problems, including for babies if the mother smokes during pregnancy.

Most of the indoor smoking bans in the U.S. have been based entirely on the fact that second hand smoke affects the employees who are forced to be there.

Further, drinking has a far deeper cultural resonance, so smoking is clearly the lower hanging fruit.

And it’s not like the UK has not been taking action against drinking. For example, they’ve imposed minimum alcohol taxes which have been directly linked to lower consumption.

Alcohol is very difficult to ban as you can take almost any kind of sugar feedstock and turn it into alcohol.

I guess that liberty was plenty abused on every non-smoker in a non-smoking area, that ended up coughing in clouds of smoke anyway. Smoking affects everyone around you whether you want it or not, and while you may smoke for 50 years and end up being perfectly healthy, some may get cancer from it, even for a very small dose.

So is banning the sale of leaded gasoline.

How far do you want to take this? Your choice of diet may have a negative effect on others by way of having to pay for additional medical care.

I do. I prefer people not to get lung cancer, among other afflications. And for no benefit that I can think of.

I don't live in the UK, but I say: good to them, and boo to you, for your misanthropic attitude.