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.
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)