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It’s perfectly democratic; it is, however, horribly illiberal.

This is like Texas when they had dry counties. This didn't stop people from drinking they just drove futher to buy it. This law is dumb they are now going lose tax dollars to the next towm over.

The manufacturers are banned from selling to new markets.

I don't think "unconstitutional" is the word you want here. There's endless things you are not free to purchase or choose for yourself.

The cost of cigs is also artificially inflated in many places. I’m glad to see less of the younger crowd smoking, that’s a good thing. But doing it in these ways just feels plain un-American.

We let an awful lot of things that are bad for us slide, because the effects aren’t as visible.

Prohibition of cigarettes won’t work

I mean, it depends.

Worth noting that a lot of historical "prohibition" efforts have been tools for hyper-policing certain neighborhoods and ethnic groups rather than efforts to actually prohibit the substance.

Re: former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Did the War on Drugs succeed in breaking the back of the Vietnam-Era antiwar movement and the mass incarceration/assassination of 60s/70s era Civil Rights Leaders? Ab-so-fucking-lutely. In that sense, they were enormously successful.

On the flip side, if you look at serious efforts to regulate sale and distribution of controlled substances, there's some cause for optimism.

Are Dry Counties Safer than Wet Counties?

While dry counties may not be as effective in reducing alcohol-related harms as some people may hope, there is evidence to suggest that other restrictions on alcohol sales may be beneficial. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests limiting the number of days when alcohol can be sold, citing research that suggests that doing so has shown to decrease consumption, alcohol-related violence, and DWIs

Similarly, the CDC also recommends limiting the time in which alcohol can be sold as research has found that increasing the sale of alcohol by two or more hours resulted in increased consumption and motor vehicle crashes.

I should further note that infrastructure improvements, like bus/rail transit and active cab services, do a lot to reduce the negative externalities of excess consumption. Similarly, access to affordable housing and medical services can curb the use of alcohol and heroin as stand-ins for treatment of pain management and depression. And environmental improvements (particularly, de-leading of the water supply and clean-up of toxic dumping sites that contribute to chronic ailments) can reduce demand for pain management drugs at the root.

The idea that you simply can't do anything about drug abuse and its consequences is heavily predicated on the assumption that our Drug Wars have sincerely sought to improve the lives of residents. When policymakers are allowed to pursue reforms that include public services and societal improvements, municipalities report significantly better results than when they're restricted purely to policing and other punitive measures.

If you ban tabacco all out its going to create a huge black market. Addicted smokers that don't want to stop aren't just going to stop.

But, raising the legal smoking age with one year every year might work. Tabacco use is already pretty low for GenZ as smoking isn't "cool" like it was in the 70s.

Congrats on cutting back. That shit is terrible for you.

yeah, being exposed to cigarette smoke is not ideal.

my issue with this law is that it feels immensely inconsistent: cars, and guns kill a huge amount of people per year. likely more than cigarettes, but i can't verify that rn. why not put some effort into those problems?

Make smokig illegal in public (been done in many places) but legal in your own home, or at places FOR that purpose.

Like alcohol