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Bloomberg Opinion

13 Dec, 10 tweets, 5 min read

If you’re a smoker who wants to indulge your habit while gazing over the mountains of the South Pacific, you’d do well to move fast.

New Zealand announced plans to become the first nation in the world to ban tobacco trib.al/SI0pMMR

Prohibition won’t happen overnight. New Zealand will raise the legal smoking age each year, so that people born after 2008 will never be allowed to puff.

That will eventually mean that tobacco smoking may start disappearing from one corner of the planet trib.al/eeRy24P

The tobacco ban in New Zealand may be a taste of things to come.

🇳🇱 The Netherlands will ban supermarket sales of tobacco starting in 2024
🇺🇸 One in four Americans supported a total smoking ban in a 2018 survey trib.al/eeRy24P

Smoking kills more than 8 million people every year, making it a scourge at least on the scale of Covid-19, which has caused about 5.3 million recorded deaths over the past two years trib.al/eeRy24P

Restrictions on indoor smoking and packaging protect bystanders from passive fumes and reduce the marketing power of cigarette businesses.

Both of these outcomes serve to enhance the welfare of all individuals trib.al/eeRy24P

Outright bans limit the scope of choice that the generation of New Zealanders who grow into this new law will be allowed to make.

That sits oddly with the current shift toward more liberal policies on similar matters trib.al/eeRy24P

More than half of U.S. states have now legalized or decriminalized cannabis for recreational uses.

Portugal and Oregon have even decriminalized possession of hard drugs trib.al/eeRy24P

The New Zealand policy won’t eradicate nicotine addiction.

As with any prohibition, it also runs the risk of encouraging organized crime. Illegal consumption of tobacco in Australia has been slowly but surely ticking up for several years trib.al/eeRy24P

Tobacco prohibition in New Zealand will certainly infringe on people’s freedoms.

Tobacco addiction has been doing that for centuries trib.al/eeRy24P

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