from Hacker News

Denmark proposes ban on selling cigarettes to people born after 2010

by caaqil on 3/16/22, 12:51 AM with 22 comments

  • by prirun on 3/16/22, 2:35 AM

    They should read about Prohibition. We were really succcessful with that. Oh, and our War on Drugs - another success story.

    Maybe Denmark can pull this off because they are a small country compared to the US. I hope we never try it, because we need to be going in the other direction: if people want to kill themselves, let them do it legally, tax it, and deny them health insurance. At least that will cut down on "crime" and all the court, legal, and police infrastructure that goes with it.

  • by xg15 on 3/16/22, 8:41 AM

    Making something illegal for an arbitrary group of people is hugely problematic, no question about that.

    On the other hand, I understand the intention. I wonder if the same could be archived by moving the threshold slower than the speed with which people age.

    Currently, the age threshold is increased by one year, every year - which effectively locks people born after a certain date out forever.

    Instead, you could increase it by one year, e.g. every two years. This would allow the next few generations to cross the threshold eventually, while still "aging out" smoking in the long term.

  • by ccakes on 3/16/22, 2:51 AM

  • by linuxdeveloper on 3/16/22, 7:41 AM

    Laws that forever affect only one portion of the population, should be illegal, full stop. We should have equal freedoms under law.

  • by dane-pgp on 3/16/22, 1:34 AM

    Obviously when 2029 comes, there are still going to be some 18 year olds who started smoking when they were 17 (despite the existing rules trying to stop that), but the new law would mean that those early smokers will never reach an age where their habit becomes legal.

    I don't know how rationally a 17 year old thinks about the relative difficulty of obtaining cigarettes for just a year until they turn 18, compared to having to obtain them illegally for the rest of their life, but with each passing year, the gap between {current average age of first cigarette} and {average age of smoker} will increase, making young smokers look more and more conspicuous.

  • by kazinator on 3/16/22, 2:50 AM

    Why would you still be talking about gradually raising some age limit, after tabling the simpler idea of tying it to a 2010-or-later birth date?

    Bureaucrats ...

  • by LocalH on 3/16/22, 12:10 PM

    Power hungry politicians always looking for the next thing to control. It’s like unabashed capitalism - it doesn’t matter if profits maintain, the expected trajectory is that they increase, so executives do that, and ultimately become evil in the process. Think about it this way - if we had the “perfect” set of laws for a given region, there would be no work for the legislators to do!