The UK just passed a landmark tobacco bill that would permanently ban the legal sale of tobacco products to anyone born on or after January 1, 2009 — an effort to create a “smoke-free generation.”
Why should either of our govts understand anything about prohibition?! They don't care and they just think we are all retarded infants that must be managed. Here's another prohibition that they could care less that it's INCREASED overdoses by over 900%. No that's not a typo. They've banned opioids and pushed this nonexistent crisis SO FAR that we now have Tylenol only orthopedic surgeons and cardiac surgeons doing the same. And more. It didn't end there. They need to get out of the way. I'm so sick to death of it
People are offended by one thing or another, Alicia. Give those people power, and they impose their own irrelevant opinions on everyone else.
"they just think we are all retarded infants that must be managed."
...And those among "we" that are likewise offended, smugly affirm the totalitarian impulses, proving the assertion of retardation.
There will be more "black markets," but that is not of any concern to government. They refuse to even control national borders and cannot reliably enforce the existing arbitrary laws, but no matter. Controlling the behavior of those that the elites cannot avoid in the upscale public places their wealth allows them to frequent, is all with which they are concerned in the context of such things as "second hand smoke."
Meanwhile those whose lives are spent in the downscale sectors, become subject to more violence and more crime of every sort.
....Because the Thalerists exaggerate and invent hazard. Smoking is not healthy, full stop. This is known, as are the reasons people take up the habit. Because the elite and their smug little "hall monitors" serve only their self-interest, the plight of those living with crime the smug can avoid, is utterly irrelevant.
Regarding opiates; there are legitimate uses for it in pain control, but government has zero concern for the agony of those requiring such strong relief.
Psychopaths walk among us unremarked, and positions of power draw them as a trapped fly draws venomous spiders. Banning opioids for legitimate pain relief, is an act of psychopathy, but who holds the male and female psychopaths to account?
Read the late Andrew Vachss' "Pain Management." It is classified as "fiction," but the vignettes are taken from anonymized real-world examples.
UK made a big step in the right direction in this case, sometimes the truth is unpopular. Ironic how delusion by the concept of FREE-DUMB can make some folks cheer for having to breathe other people's disgusting second-hand smoke and endanger their own health (and the smokers' health) just so that tobacco companies can rake in billions...
The question isn't whether prohibition works. It doesn't — we've run that experiment with alcohol, drugs, and now tobacco, and the results are always the same. The question is why we keep arriving at the same failed conclusion.
The answer lies in the paradigm itself.
Modern science has perfected the art of declaring the surface symptom as the underlying cause. Smoking causes lung cancer the same way wet streets cause rain. It's a linear equation imposed on a multidimensional phenomenon by a consciousness that cannot see the forest for the trees.
Smoking doesn't cause disease. Excess smoking is a symptom of unresolved emotional pressure. The substance isn't the cause. The relationship to it is. This is the difference between a shaman using tobacco in ceremony and a factory worker chain-smoking through a 12-hour shift. The plant is the same. The human condition behind it is not.
Humanity has smoked since time immemorial. Indigenous cultures across every continent used smoke — tobacco, sage, cedar, copal — as a cleanser. What the ancients called "driving out bad spirits" we might now understand as neutralizing pathogenic fields in the environment. Smoke was medicine before it was demonized.
During COVID-19, smokers had remarkably lower rates of severe illness and death. The drying properties of smoke appear to have neutralized the fluid accumulation that drowned the lungs of critical patients. Nicotine itself may function as a biological shield against parasites — a natural ivermectin of sorts. These findings were quietly buried because they contradicted the established dogma.
Japan has maintained one of the highest smoking rates in the developed world for decades. It also has one of the lowest rates of lung cancer. This contradiction is so glaring that researchers gave it its own name — "the Japanese smoking paradox." If the linear model were correct, Japan should be drowning in lung cancer. It isn't because the model is broken.
And here's where it gets truly absurd: the UK bans the organic leaf that humans have smoked for thousands of years, while keeping electronic cigarettes fully legal for anyone over 18.
E-cigarettes aerosolize propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, and microscopic particles of nickel, chromium, and lead directly into lung tissue. This is not smoking a plant. This is inhaling vaporized metal. If there is a lung cancer epidemic coming, it won't come from tobacco — it will come from the devices we promoted as the "healthy" alternative.
The irony and delusion are staggering. We ban the ancient and permit the synthetic. We criminalize the organic and subsidize the metallic. And we do this while congratulating ourselves on creating a "smoke-free generation."
.
.
For the record: I'm not a smoker. I don't enjoy the smell. And I recognize that commercial cigarettes are chemically adulterated. What Marlboro sells is not what a Cherokee elder smoked.
But the relentless vilification of smokers — the social ostracism, the moral shaming, the treatment of a human being as a walking biohazard for lighting a cigarette — is both cruel and intellectually dishonest.
I have no agenda here except the principle: when we consistently mistake the symptom for the cause, every solution we build on that mistake will fail. Prohibition is just the latest in a long line of such failures.
The real question isn't whether the UK should ban cigarettes. The real question is why, after thousands of years of coexistence with tobacco, we suddenly decided — within the span of forty years — that an entire plant is the enemy. And why no one thought to ask what changed in us.
In the 1980s, Soviet leader Gorbatchev banned vodka. A black market ensued... and it almost ruined Russia. Add to this the Chornobyl (1986) incident and the war in Afghanistan (1979-89). And there you have it: the USSR collapsed.
Of course it will. Think about anything that's banned that people want; there will be a supply network for it. The best example is alcohol prohibition in the USA roughly a century ago. A current example is the market for nicotine products of all kinds in Australia. Cigarettes aren't banned outright, but they are so over-taxed there hat the illicit market far exceeds the government-sanctioned market.
The UK has become a govt obsessed with control of every facet of life. They have arrested thousands of people for harmless social media posts that "offended" someone. They even arrested a Brit for posting a picture of himself on vacation in the US at a trap shooting event.
So another ban is just expansion of govt control and nothing to do with protecting the public. It's just another step in totalitarian rule. Another easy target. What about rampant obesity? Which of the two is actually worse? What are the numbers? And, by the way, how much tax revenue will be lost by the UK? How will they compensate for that loss? The money spent on tobacco will simply transition from the govt coffers to the underground mafia types.
I don't think prohibition of sales works. I think what works is prohibition of smoking in all public spaces. I quit smoking easily (although I was never a heavy smoker) when I moved from Europe to California, where it was prohibited in the spaces where I used to like to smoke: at home (because I was a renter), and in restaurants and coffee shops. I was also struck by the fact that none of my peers in graduate school smoked - except for one recent transplant, a professor from Germany. This was the early 2000s. Broadening the prohibition to anywhere other people hang out, which makes sense since the smell is disgusting and a real nuisance, would make it even more inconvenient and induce even more people to quit or never take it up.
Why should either of our govts understand anything about prohibition?! They don't care and they just think we are all retarded infants that must be managed. Here's another prohibition that they could care less that it's INCREASED overdoses by over 900%. No that's not a typo. They've banned opioids and pushed this nonexistent crisis SO FAR that we now have Tylenol only orthopedic surgeons and cardiac surgeons doing the same. And more. It didn't end there. They need to get out of the way. I'm so sick to death of it
Good points. But they will never get out of the way on their own. We, the People, need to put them out of the way and reclaim our government.
I agree. When do we ride?!
People are offended by one thing or another, Alicia. Give those people power, and they impose their own irrelevant opinions on everyone else.
"they just think we are all retarded infants that must be managed."
...And those among "we" that are likewise offended, smugly affirm the totalitarian impulses, proving the assertion of retardation.
There will be more "black markets," but that is not of any concern to government. They refuse to even control national borders and cannot reliably enforce the existing arbitrary laws, but no matter. Controlling the behavior of those that the elites cannot avoid in the upscale public places their wealth allows them to frequent, is all with which they are concerned in the context of such things as "second hand smoke."
Meanwhile those whose lives are spent in the downscale sectors, become subject to more violence and more crime of every sort.
....Because the Thalerists exaggerate and invent hazard. Smoking is not healthy, full stop. This is known, as are the reasons people take up the habit. Because the elite and their smug little "hall monitors" serve only their self-interest, the plight of those living with crime the smug can avoid, is utterly irrelevant.
Regarding opiates; there are legitimate uses for it in pain control, but government has zero concern for the agony of those requiring such strong relief.
Psychopaths walk among us unremarked, and positions of power draw them as a trapped fly draws venomous spiders. Banning opioids for legitimate pain relief, is an act of psychopathy, but who holds the male and female psychopaths to account?
Read the late Andrew Vachss' "Pain Management." It is classified as "fiction," but the vignettes are taken from anonymized real-world examples.
UK made a big step in the right direction in this case, sometimes the truth is unpopular. Ironic how delusion by the concept of FREE-DUMB can make some folks cheer for having to breathe other people's disgusting second-hand smoke and endanger their own health (and the smokers' health) just so that tobacco companies can rake in billions...
The question isn't whether prohibition works. It doesn't — we've run that experiment with alcohol, drugs, and now tobacco, and the results are always the same. The question is why we keep arriving at the same failed conclusion.
The answer lies in the paradigm itself.
Modern science has perfected the art of declaring the surface symptom as the underlying cause. Smoking causes lung cancer the same way wet streets cause rain. It's a linear equation imposed on a multidimensional phenomenon by a consciousness that cannot see the forest for the trees.
Smoking doesn't cause disease. Excess smoking is a symptom of unresolved emotional pressure. The substance isn't the cause. The relationship to it is. This is the difference between a shaman using tobacco in ceremony and a factory worker chain-smoking through a 12-hour shift. The plant is the same. The human condition behind it is not.
Humanity has smoked since time immemorial. Indigenous cultures across every continent used smoke — tobacco, sage, cedar, copal — as a cleanser. What the ancients called "driving out bad spirits" we might now understand as neutralizing pathogenic fields in the environment. Smoke was medicine before it was demonized.
During COVID-19, smokers had remarkably lower rates of severe illness and death. The drying properties of smoke appear to have neutralized the fluid accumulation that drowned the lungs of critical patients. Nicotine itself may function as a biological shield against parasites — a natural ivermectin of sorts. These findings were quietly buried because they contradicted the established dogma.
Japan has maintained one of the highest smoking rates in the developed world for decades. It also has one of the lowest rates of lung cancer. This contradiction is so glaring that researchers gave it its own name — "the Japanese smoking paradox." If the linear model were correct, Japan should be drowning in lung cancer. It isn't because the model is broken.
And here's where it gets truly absurd: the UK bans the organic leaf that humans have smoked for thousands of years, while keeping electronic cigarettes fully legal for anyone over 18.
E-cigarettes aerosolize propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, and microscopic particles of nickel, chromium, and lead directly into lung tissue. This is not smoking a plant. This is inhaling vaporized metal. If there is a lung cancer epidemic coming, it won't come from tobacco — it will come from the devices we promoted as the "healthy" alternative.
The irony and delusion are staggering. We ban the ancient and permit the synthetic. We criminalize the organic and subsidize the metallic. And we do this while congratulating ourselves on creating a "smoke-free generation."
.
.
For the record: I'm not a smoker. I don't enjoy the smell. And I recognize that commercial cigarettes are chemically adulterated. What Marlboro sells is not what a Cherokee elder smoked.
But the relentless vilification of smokers — the social ostracism, the moral shaming, the treatment of a human being as a walking biohazard for lighting a cigarette — is both cruel and intellectually dishonest.
I have no agenda here except the principle: when we consistently mistake the symptom for the cause, every solution we build on that mistake will fail. Prohibition is just the latest in a long line of such failures.
The real question isn't whether the UK should ban cigarettes. The real question is why, after thousands of years of coexistence with tobacco, we suddenly decided — within the span of forty years — that an entire plant is the enemy. And why no one thought to ask what changed in us.
In the 1980s, Soviet leader Gorbatchev banned vodka. A black market ensued... and it almost ruined Russia. Add to this the Chornobyl (1986) incident and the war in Afghanistan (1979-89). And there you have it: the USSR collapsed.
Funny how they will murder people with the COVID “vaccines”, but not permit them to kill themselves with cigarettes.
"Will That Fuel A Black Market?"
Of course it will. Think about anything that's banned that people want; there will be a supply network for it. The best example is alcohol prohibition in the USA roughly a century ago. A current example is the market for nicotine products of all kinds in Australia. Cigarettes aren't banned outright, but they are so over-taxed there hat the illicit market far exceeds the government-sanctioned market.
The UK has become a govt obsessed with control of every facet of life. They have arrested thousands of people for harmless social media posts that "offended" someone. They even arrested a Brit for posting a picture of himself on vacation in the US at a trap shooting event.
So another ban is just expansion of govt control and nothing to do with protecting the public. It's just another step in totalitarian rule. Another easy target. What about rampant obesity? Which of the two is actually worse? What are the numbers? And, by the way, how much tax revenue will be lost by the UK? How will they compensate for that loss? The money spent on tobacco will simply transition from the govt coffers to the underground mafia types.
I don't think prohibition of sales works. I think what works is prohibition of smoking in all public spaces. I quit smoking easily (although I was never a heavy smoker) when I moved from Europe to California, where it was prohibited in the spaces where I used to like to smoke: at home (because I was a renter), and in restaurants and coffee shops. I was also struck by the fact that none of my peers in graduate school smoked - except for one recent transplant, a professor from Germany. This was the early 2000s. Broadening the prohibition to anywhere other people hang out, which makes sense since the smell is disgusting and a real nuisance, would make it even more inconvenient and induce even more people to quit or never take it up.
In-sane,
In-deed,
In denial.
I never thought the UK would ban fags.
Hahaha