Cigarettes: the path to a “smoke-free” UK
“Are we reaching the fag-end of smoking culture?” asked Will
Gore on The Independent. The Government hopes so. It wants to make England “smoke-free” by 2030 (defined as reducing tobacco use to less than 5% of the population; the level is now 14%). An independent review published last week offered some ideas for how this target might be reached. Among its proposals was that the legal age of sale for tobacco, currently 18, should rise by one year every year, so that eventually nobody can buy it. A similar plan has already been introduced in
New Zealand: there, it will always be illegal to sell cigarettes to anyone born after 2008.
The Government “should get on and implement” this, said The Times. Smoking is a powerful and harmful addiction. If the state can help people give up, or not take up the habit in the first place, it should. Stopping people taking up smoking is the best way of reducing tobacco use, said Martha Gill in the London Evening Standard. Recent research in the Netherlands suggested that it would take huge tax rises to make existing smokers quit. Half of those surveyed set their “giving up” price at s60 (£51) a pack – and Dutch ministers accordingly want to push up the price of a pack of cigarettes to s47 (£40) by 2040. “As interventions go, that is fairly non-egalitarian. Better, surely, to raise the smoking age.”
Not if it means treating every person born after an arbitrary date as if they were a child, said Matthew Lesh in The Daily Telegraph. Are we really going to pave the way for a “cosmically absurd situation” in which a 50-year-old has to ask their 51-year-old mate to buy some fags for them? The review’s ideas about banning smoking in beer gardens, on beaches and in new council housing are illiberal enough. But using rising age limits to ban smoking outright really is a step too far. The researchers justify it by claiming that smoking isn’t a “choice” but an “addiction”. But you could make the same case against junk food, alcohol or even caffeine. If we accept the “pernicious” logic that it’s “the state’s role to prevent us from making decisions about our own bodies”, we’ll open ourselves up to all sorts of infringements of our liberty.