Media reports New Zealand plans to eliminate smoking
“New Zealand unveiled a plan … to eventually ban all sales of cigarettes in the country, a decades-long effort unique in the world to prevent young people from taking up smoking. The proposed legislation, which is expected to become law next year, would leave current smokers free to continue buying cigarettes. But it would gradually raise the smoking age, year by year, until it covers the entire population. Starting in 2023, anyone under age 15 would be barred for life from buying cigarettes…” NY Times, 9 Dec 2021″;
“Liberal societies will rightly seek to enhance individuals’ sovereignty over their bodies, and tread carefully when they take those freedoms away. Addictive drugs already violate that sovereignty, though, by making it physically or psychologically painful to give them up. Tobacco prohibition in New Zealand will certainly infringe on people’s freedoms. Tobacco addiction, however, has been doing that for centuries.” David Fickling. New Zealand Is Banning Tobacco. Will Anyone Follow? Bloomberg News, 13 December 2021.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-12-13/new-zealand-is-banning-tobacco-should-the-world-follow
S.Hamann
