The UK’s Ban on Cigarettes Will — Well, Go Up in Smoke
The ‘biggest public health intervention for a generation’ probably won’t work.
‘During Prohibition,’ wrote the actor W. C. Fields, ‘I was forced to go for days on nothing but food and water.’ Fields was not the only one who struggled. No wonder that during those 13 dry years, when the American government inexplicably shut down the fifth-largest industry in the country, criminals thrived. By 1295, half-way through a decade that would be known for its excesses, there were between 30,000 and 100,000 speak-easy clubs in New York City alone. No one doubted that alcohol caused harm, of course (as the 19th-century author of the Reveries of a Paragrapher put it, ‘Almost anything can be preserved by it, except health, happiness, and money’). But for most Americans, it was worth it.
So it is with curiosity that I read that our embattled prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is still planning to ban cigarettes for the next generation, even after New Zealand reversed its own version of the law. Children younger than 14 will never be able to buy cigarettes legally and, if all goes smoothly, England will be smoke-free by 2030. Rishi says that smoking causes one in four cancer deaths, or around 64,000 deaths a year. It puts pressure on the groaning NHS. And it is highly addictive. His plan is ‘the biggest public health intervention for a generation’. After COVID, you would think he would have had enough of those.
Children younger than 14 will never be able to buy cigarettes legally and, if all goes smoothly, England will be smoke-free by 2030.
It is slightly grating that we cannot be trusted to eat, drink or smoke what we like, but not to worry. We do not need to make arguments about personal freedom to show why this policy has not been thought-through. The main reason has to do with policing it. It will be tricky. If smokers cannot buy cigarettes legally, they will try to buy them illegally, and a black market will emerge. Criminals will get rich, the cops will get stretched, and people who want to smoke will still be able to. And that is to say nothing of the arbitrary cut-off point between people who can smoke and people who cannot. A 19-year-old could be standing outside a club, inhaling some nicotine sharpness back into into her drink-soaked mind (if alcohol does not get banned next), and her 18-year-old friend would not be allowed to do the same. Are we really expecting the 18-year-old to twiddle her thumbs?
Criminals will get rich, the cops will get stretched, and people who want to smoke will still be able to.
The point, they say, is that, due to ‘de-normalisation’ (a silly word) it would discourage young people from smoking. I am not sure about this. At best, vaping — which the government has not addressed and on which it will ‘consult’— will become even more popular. At worst, smoking will acquire the taboo status of weed and other banned drugs, which, by virtue of sharing a category, also make genuinely harmful drugs seem just as bad (i.e. not very bad), while acting a gateway for their use. My parrot, Coco Chanel*, who has tried everything, tells me she did heaps of research chemicals while at parrot university because they, like other drugs, were illegal, and other drugs were not so bad.
In case it is at all relevant, I do not smoke, and never have. But I am not wild about the idea that I cannot be trusted to make that call myself and, at any rate (it is more relevant, frankly, in this case) prohibition does not work, especially when the banned substance is famous for being addictive. You cannot help but think that a policy like this one springs from the desperation of a prime minister about to lose a general election by a landslide and aiming for a crowd-pleaser. The irony is that its inspiration, Jacinda Ardern’s proposal, was probably scribbled on the back of a cigarette packet which, like the policy, was soon discarded.
*I have changed the name and species of this individual to protect their identity.
