lettucethesallad said:
I have a friend who's a radical straight edge kid. We had a discussion on facebook the other day on smoking, and the fact that more people in our community have started smoking. My friend is of the opinion that smoking should be made illegal and classed as a drug, and that the state should step in to essentially protect people from themselves.
Me being a libertarian, I argued that people, knowing the dangers of smoking, should choose for themselves if they want to do it or not. I was immediately stormed by an angry mob of facebookers who showed their dislike with indignified comments.
Eager to get to the bottom of this, I thought I'd ask you guys.
Tl;dr: Should smoking be made illegal?
Speaking objectively? Yes it should.
The reason I say this is that I believe there are certain things you can't really "know" until your there. Smoking is one of those things that there is a lot of information about, but at the same time to many people it sounds so unbelievable and panic-written that I don't think many people, especially young adults, really believe it. The scary thing about smoking is that when people start to have problems, a lot of them really want to quit, and then they can't because it's a very powerful addiction.
Of course the problem with this is the same as banning any other behavior of the sort. It's going to take time, resources, and most importantly blood. When something is decided like this morality has to be put aside and a "git R done" attitude has to be taken, or else it's going to fail. Simply put the problem with both the Probition , and the "War On Drugs" is that nobody was willing to do what it took, and pursue things ruthlessly enough. The US ban on Alcohol didn't take all *that* long, not even a single human generation before it was deemed a failure due to the amount of violence and chaos sticking to their guns would have caused. When it comes to drugs, a big part of the problem is again the goverment not being ruthless enough either domestically, or most importantly internationally. A "war on drugs" can be won, "The British Empire" did it, all those huge international drug cartels that were running Opium dens and stuff right up to the beginning of the 20th century got decimated. A lot of people refer to a lot of the British Empire's actions collectively as "The Opium Wars" for a reason. They went into The Middle East, Asia, and other places specifically to break the backs of specific groups of people who were controlling the drug trade, and thus the addicts, and beginning to undermine the goverment due to that amount of power. This is part of what Muslims burning a poppy in the UK (with the rest of their protests) was all about. Nations like Afghanistan are poor and wretched because their only real national resource is poppies (which are used to make Heroin) and they can't export or trade it like they'd want to.
See, there is more to some of these drug wars and such than just the effects on users.
At any rate, in the long term I think banning smoking would be beneficial. Tobacco companies have their fingers into a lot of things nowadays as well due to the sheer amounts of money that they make. I have no illusions about it ever happening because simply put the US at least would never commit to it.
