Quote Originally Posted by Ropey View Post
I just see it as an economic thing, especially as the gov't takes over health care more and more. The gov't doesn't want to pay for preventable illnesses. Same with mandatory seat belt laws, mandatory motorcycle helmet laws, etc. It all comes down to money. Even with taxes, tobacco related illnesses not only cost the gov't direct cash but also loss of production and consumption.

I don't really judge whether laws like that are universally bad or good. I'll leave that up to the pundits.



True but cars have a socioeconomic value that presumably outweighs their cost (pollution, injury, death). The argument against tobacco is that its socioeconomic cost (disease) is greater than its value.

Compare that with alcohol which has an extremely high social cost but which is so pleasurable that attempts to ban it have been largely unsuccessful. It might be tobacco's downfall that it doesn't produce more of a "high!"

Finally compare that with marijuana, which has been shown to have less social cost than the old reefer madness days of the mid 20th century. No, your daughter isn't going to sell her innocence for a couple of tokes on a joint.

Just do the cost-benefit analysis and you can easily determine what will be legal and illegal in the years to come.

But for the interviewee in the OP to call such regulations "insane" shows that he doesn't seem to know much about macroeconomics. There's nothing societally "insane" about regulating private behavior -- governments have been doing it since the dawn of time and will do it as long as human societies exist.

To think that you're immune to it just because you live in the US is a shortsightedness that boggles my mind. It seems like the guy is just throwing a tantrum. I support people's right to smoke but by understanding all sides of the argument one can better get more of what one wants.

To wit, instead of whining about how evil the government is, conduct some studies showing either 1) the social cost of smoking is not as high as previously thought, or 2) the social value of smoking is higher than previously thought.

Take some clues from NORML and the gay rights movements to see how to do it. Their efforts have made behaviors that were outlawed at one time to be more or less perfectly OK in the span of just a few years.
There are actually a bunch of studies showing that smokers cost less in the long run than non-smokers, simply because smokers tend to die younger and thus avoid the almost unfathomably expensive end-of-life health care costs that most other people accrue in their last couple years. That particular field is my dad's specialty, and we've talked a lot about it over the years.

That's part of the reason why the anti-tobacco crusade sometimes feels more like a witch hunt or trendy cause celebre than a rational pursuit.

Either way, your last piece of advice is good! I just don't know how we'd do it.