The world-first ban prohibits anyone born after Jan. 1, 2007, from ever buying, using or smoking tobacco.
The Maldives has become the first country in the world to impose a generational smoking ban, barring anyone born after Jan. 1, 2007, from ever smoking, purchasing or using tobacco.
“The ban applies to all forms of tobacco, and retailers are required to verify age prior to sale,” the health ministry said Saturday as the ban came into effect.
The step “makes the Maldives the first country in the world to enforce a nationwide generational tobacco ban,” it added.
last year around 1.2 billion people were smoking that were of adult age (18), vs in 2000, it was 1.38 billion. (source WHO)
this really tells me that smoking still isn’t going anywhere in this world, and it begs the question, if smoking is still going to be so prevalent, despite countries smacking warnings and such on packaging, what do we do for harm reduction that the current products available don’t solve? vaping is dead there’s so much negativity around it, gum, patch, etc… are not utilized much as people never stick to using it for the most part, and pouches don’t satisfy the same thing a cigarette does for some people.
I smoked for 10 years, then started vaping 11 years ago. Honestly, its so hard for me to quit, and i really just want to smoke again because of how good it makes me feel, and its an internal struggle because of the negative effects of what smoking can do to your body.
I don’t know what the solution to this is.
The solutions:
For the individual: Don’t start in the first place, which is what the Maldives are hoping to help people achieve.
For governments: Copy whatever local legislation applies to heroin and make it apply to nicotine as well. The article doesn’t say what the Maldives intend to do to underage smokers and those who’d sell to them, but I’d be making it unnecessarily draconian just so people get the message.
For people who are already smokers: Nicotine patches of decreasing strength over time and some sort of media teaching pen-flipping or other legal hand-based hobby. Having something for the hands to do is a big part of it. If these can be prescribed by medical or psychological practitioners, all the better.
see the tricky thing is that i can’t find data on how many people have truly quitted smoking using NRT. I’d like to see how successful it really is, and prove myself wrong that there is in fact, good progress on abstaining from tobacco. The only thing i was able to go off of was current est. of smokers worldwide, and while vs 2000 was a drop, it’s still quite high, and not optimistic outlooks on a substantial drop in smoking (but in a positive light, hopefully less cancer and ill people)
I think we have more adults alive now than we did in 2000 though. It’s a slight decline in % of smokers.
That’s true
Limit the amount of nicotine, tar, etc, per cigarette.
For most smokers, one single cigarette is what they consume at once on a smoke break at work. Most people don’t smoke 5 in a row. If they get less of the bad shit per cigarette, they get less of it per day.
I’d also recommend super high cigarette prices, but that just leads to more smuggling. There’s a balance to be found there too.
There has also been a huge push into developing countries by the tobacco industry, so while smoking rates are way down in the developed world they are climbing elsewhere thanks to poorer education and lax government regulation.
good points