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.
boomer ass move
Has prohibition ever worked? Wouldn’t this just create a black market for selling tobacco?
I don’t get the reasoning that “prohibition has never worked” and “there will be a black market”.
Yes there will be, and a number of people will still smoke.
But it will be a minority of people that would normally smoke. It will also remove smoking from the public image.
I really can’t imagine there being a larger number of smokers just because it’s prohibited.
Prohibition of the history tend to prohibit the sale of such substance for everyone, this one is kinda like a new-ish idea, merely prohibit people born after a certain year from ever purchasing tobacco, preventing them to even starting, or at least in theory. It however did not prevent people who already smoke from purchasing it. It’s a less severe form of prohibition, akin to prohibition from selling to people younger than 18, no-smoking zone. Smoking decline in a lot of country didn’t happened by chance, its a result from a shit tons of rule set on tobacco industry, short from blanket ban.
As for black market, you can’t create something that’s already exists.
There are quite a few Asian & Middle Eastern countries that have similar bans. A few Muslim countries have prohibition laws saying Muslims can’t buy alcohol, but it’s still legal for Christians, etc.
It’s certainly not common, but less of a new idea than you might think. My knowledge runs out there, though - I genuinely don’t know how well/poorly those kinds of laws perform even in those areas.
Imo, as someone living in a muslim country with alcohol sales ban on muslim only, there’s nothing similar to this. For one, if the law isn’t being amended later on, the sales ban will only and ever only imposed on muslim, prohibiting them from ever purchasing alcoholic drink. This has been a thing since the begining of Islam. What different from the generation ban is there’s in no point in time alcohol would be prohibited to anyone. The generation ban on tobacco sales however will adjust the age of smoking up by one year, every year, automatically without amending the law, so by the time the last person born after a certain year dies the prohibition will only then take effect for everyone. This is what i mean it’s new-ish, because it’s not a hard blanket ban like everything we used to see, but a soft ban that slowly take effect in a time span of a few decades.
As for it being effective or not, if we compared to the alcoholic drinks ban for muslim, does it stop muslim from drinking? No. But does it significantly decrease it? Yes. It also mean it’s significantly harder for muslim to be addicted to alcohol exactly because it’s harder to obtain and consume it, they can’t just walk into a store and get it, they have to get from other source.
Can you really judge how effective it is when we’re talking about a cohort whose religion prohibits drinking alcohol? What % of those people were never going to try to buy it anyway?
While smoking isn’t explicitly mentioned in the quran(because tobacco industry isn’t much a thing back then), the religion basically said any substance that cause self harm or impede judgement is haram. Guess what tobacco is.
In Malaysia, tobacco use in 2023 is around 19.5%, if we then divide this using the current demographic which is 70% Muslim, around 13.65% of tobacco user who is also a muslim. That’s the number of muslim that wilfully defy the islamic teaching and using substance that is considered harmful to one self. Yet when we look at alcoholic use the number is really minute to the point you will only read about it in the news, but never seen a drunk muslim. It’s exactly because one substance is banned for them while another is not.
But you know what is also banned for muslim but it still so prevalent? Gambling. Here we have this lottery where people buy a 4 digits number and the prize is given if your number matched the drawn. Because this game is simply number and have no physical form, illegal bookie can appear anywhere, and it’s so easily accessible that a lot of the bookie is set up just to serve muslim.
Have you ever tried taking peoples coffee away at work. My office did that once a long time ago and it lasted all of a few hours, people literally refused to work until it was given back. It was hilarious to me since I make my own coffee at home and got to watch the chaos unfold fully caffeinated. I can’t imagine the inability to
workfunction for nicotine addicts.Their coffee isn’t being taken away though, it’s never being given to them in the first place.
Depends what you mean by work. Before I finally quit for good, I had several attempts that failed. If I could drive for more than 30 seconds without passing a place where I could get smokes in less than a minute, I’m pretty sure one of the earlier attempts would have stuck. I sure as hell wouldn’t have engaged in any black market activity to get them.
I’m not in favor of restricting other people’s choices due to my lack of willpower, so I’m not in favor of bans. But if your definition of working is a very large percentage drop in smokers, it might work despite adding tobacco to the black market.
It would certainly be a lot harder to get pack-a-day addicted. It would probably be a more occasional indulgence for those that did get them.
The issue is that during the prohibition, the governement started selling poisoned alcohol on the black market. Its not wild to speculate that the government currently has a hand in all the fenanyl going around. The issue with banning it isnt that it works/doesnt, or that it limits people or anything like that. The issue is that when it is banned, there is no governmental oversight on ensuring the product is safe, and the government has every reason to poison those getting it from the black market. People are going to die over this in preventable ways.
It can work if there’s a safer legal alternative. Like theres a black market for moonshine but it’s miniscule compared to the whole alcohol market because most people would rather go to a normal store and buy vodka instead cause they know what they’re getting. Same with tobacco, they aren’t banning all nicotine products, just smoking, so if the options are to smoke this probably contaminated tobacco you get off the black market or vape / chew nicotine products that have some quality assurance most people will choose the latter.
That’s a good point - with a safer / more convenient alternative it no longer makes sense to get the prohibited item from a suspicious source.
I didn’t see much for alternatives mentioned in the article, so I’d imagine something like this would then boost other nicotine options like chewables or patches…? I’m curious to see where it goes. I can’t help but think it just pushes the issue somewhere else rather than solving it.
It at least solves the problem of - those who don’t want to inhale it having to inhale it along with the air they breathe.
If people want to fill their own bodies with random drugs that make them fake-happy, might as well let them.
Oh, and using peer pressure to make someone use drugs need to be in a similar category to assault.
You understand that they’re not planning on cutting off people who already smoke, right?
You did actually read something and didn’t just kneecirclejerk your response?
Is using a dictionary a “kneecirclejerk” response? If so, then I’ll accept it:
Today You Learned - “Prohibition” is a law forbidding whatever. It does not imply it forbids everyone from the thing. The term is commonly used to describe alcohol prohibition, which usually takes the shape of a total ban on alcohol, so I understand how you could get so confused.
However, Iran only prohibits alcohol for Muslims. Sri Lanka only prohibits women from buying alcohol. Still prohibition. This article? It’s about the Maldives introducing the prohibition of tobacco products to anyone born after a certain date.
“kneejerk”. Or “circlejerk”. Never heard of “kneecirclejerk”.
Not the person you are arguing with
Never heard of “kneecirclejerk”
Me neither. Surely it’s some kind of dance?
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)
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)
I think we have more adults alive now than we did in 2000 though. It’s a slight decline in % of smokers.
this really tells me that smoking still isn’t going anywhere in this world
That’s true
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?
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
Maybe I’m misremembering but didn’t Australia do something like this?
New Zealand and looks like they walked back on it
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/28/asia/new-zealand-smoking-ban-reversal-intl-hnk
Ah makes sense. I think the heart is in the right place for these sorts of bans but prohibition just doesn’t work. Tobacco usage is already way down since the 50s and that’s been because of education, not prohibition. Banning it just makes it seem cool again
Yes, it won’t work. But tobacco use in the Maldives has apparently not followed the trend of the rest of the world since the 50s. From the article:
Smoking is especially prevalent among young people, with nearly half of those ages 13 to 15 consuming some form of tobacco.
Half is insane.
So there is clearly a driving factor behind that, it would seem more beneficial to address that instead of a blanket ban that is guaranteed to make things worse. Wonder why smoking is so prevalant there?
Edit: dodnt get a clear answer on why, but it seems smoking is deeply embedded in their culture. 43% of men aged 15 or older smoke, while its only 4% of women in the same group smoke. Theyve also been trying to put an end to smoking for almost a decade now, not sure how much it has helped as i just cant find much info on them.
Yep, smoking is down because of it being a taboo thing now. You make it illegal…and you got another drug war on your hands.
Prohibition will never work.
Removed by the conservative government because they needed revenue to pay for their tax cuts for millionaires.
Yup, our shit-stain conservative govt rolled back one of the most popular policies in decades against the public desire, with legislation practically copied n pasted from tobacco industry lobbyists
Might as well get rid of the farms.
Perhaps use them for reforestation and stuff.
Maybe even start some new plant-based industry.Tobacco no longer gets rid of mosquitoes. Its benefits are either long gone or didn’t exist in the first place.
won’t work. Evidently The Maldives have never heard of this thing we like to call “history”.
