Banning cigarettes for young people will ensure they are as impossible to buy as cannabis, insists government

25 comments

1. Cigarettes should be harder to get than cannabis. It is way worse for you and destroys your life

2. Joking aside, they miss the fact that young people generally wouldn’t want to seek out cigarettes if they were illegal for them to buy.

   Smoking levels among young people have plummeted in recent decades.

   The satire has missed the mark on this one I think.

3. Cigarettes are actually bad for your health. This is an established fact.

4. Ha! I could get weed faster than I could get cigarettes.

5. At 16 it was easier to get weed than cigs because I didn’t have ID (only had to be 16 to buy cigs)

6. How’re the government gonna fund all those services that tobacco tax pays for when bonus buying cigarettes? Tax something else you say? Oh, ok

7. ‘Impossible’? Everywhere I walk all I smell is green in the air.

   Seriously though who can afford to smoke fags these days anyway?

8. And cannabis is piss easy to get, so this sounds doomed to fail.

9. I could literally go for a 20 minute walk and be asked to buy weed from at least 3 different people.. could’ve used a better comparison

10. “will ensure they are as impossible to buy as cannabis” don’t know about cigarettes but I can get bud delivered in less time than it takes to get a pizza. This is doing the opposite as what they want, as with all things. If people want it, they’ll find a way.

11. So a quick whistle over the balcony and the road man will have your 20 Marlboro in less time than it takes to go down the shop. Genius.

12. Yeah, like cannabis is difficult to get hold of. These people are fuckin’ donkeys.

13. ‘Impossible to buy’ lol its easier to purchase than cigarettes. Weed gets dropped to me, I have to leave the house for fags.

14. Cannabis is not highly addictive. Where do you get your facts from?

15. Much wow. Tackling serious problems. Not rent control or wages. Nope. Freaking smoking, monkaS

16. An awful lot of people in the comments seem to be missing that this is a satire site

17. I can guarantee that most young people can get cannabis with one phone call and a 5 minute wait. Cigs will be easier than that.

18. I was in town today and smelt plain cigarette smoke once but passed people smoking weed about 5 or 6 times. This was early before 10 am.

19. >Banning cigarettes for young people will ensure they are as impossible to buy as cannabis, insists government

    So available for home delivery via text with minimum effort then?

20. Honestly, remove them from shops and demand will fall. It’s a pretty shit drug at he end of the day. If you’re going to go grey or black market you might as well buy something fun like weed.

21. Weed is easier to get and is a lot cheaper due to the lack of taxes

22. As with pretty much every other problem, the issue is education.

    Smoking is extremely bad for your health, detrimental to your finances but people still do it for social reasons. There are other, less toxic ways to achieve those same things. So what’s the conclusion? People’s epistemologies are fucked. So how do you fix that? Maybe we should actually teach epistemology? Maybe it should be a core principle of the education system?

    If we have people making irrational decisions then the solution is to produce rationally literate people. This way, instead of the undesired side effects that result from authoritarian policies like making things illegal, we might solve the problem and benefit from a myriad of positive collateral effects as a result of people thinking more rationally and logically.

23. Great way of admitting it won’t work and the police won’t do anything about it because they’ve already got too much to do.

    I know nobody who deals and I could probably find a hookup within the hour

24. I find this whole argument bizarre.

    Yes cannabis can be bad.

    So can smoking, which also is how most people consume it.

    Alcohol can be bad too.

    The line between what should be allowed in a free liberal society and protecting the people/the services that are effected by it is a fine line.

    If we ban smoking does that mean alcohol is next?

    A bit of alcohol is fine and has shown to have positive and negative health effects.

    Exactly the same with cannabis

    Exactly the same with smoking, specifically nicotine.

    In my opinion they should all be legal with the potential problems explained and then regulated and taxed as is with alcohol right now.

    I say this as an alcohol lover and a very occasional smoker and want to smoke cannabis again(used to smoke it frequently as a teenager, amongst other drugs)

25. Well done newsthump, I took a huge bite of that onion.