Should smoking be banned?

Question

Smoking is just as harmful as any other drug. Why do we continue to allow it? It no only is harmful to do but it harms the people around you....

Answer 1

I believe that smoking should be banned. It not only harms the user but the people around them. Everytime I see a person smoking I want to take that cigarette, throw it on the ground, step on it, and yell "Stop killing yourself!!!!" It really is the same thing as suicide overtime.

Answer 2

No.

The government should get out of the business of telling people how to live their lives.

Smokers do not harm the people around them -- unless the people around them are trapped at least 40 hours a week, every week, for decades.

(Someone passing you on the sidewalk smoking does NO harm to you whatsoever.)

Now that it's illegal to smoke in any public place, (at least where I live) smoking harms only the smokers.

Control freaks that want to tell everyone what they should and shouldn't do, and want to ban everything they personally don't do cause more harm than people who smoke outside and in their own houses.

Answer 3

Smoking will never be banned and do you know why? Money!!!! The State and US Government rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in tobacco taxes. The state I live in alone annually collects $30 million a year. Ban smoking, no taxes collected. You think government would just not miss that kind of money? Absolutely not. Other taxes would be raised in order to offset the difference. It seems odd that we see state paid ads for anti-smoking commercials on TV and it's the state that is monetarily benefitting the most from tobacco.

Answer 4

You didn't offer any evidence it directly harms anyone around a smoker. Would you care to provide some?

As usual, the only way to gain knowledge, especially about something one knows very little to nothing about, one MUST study history.

The US Government once tried banning alcohol, and even beer, which created a huge underground, black market and is directly responsible for the rise of "the mob", as they took lucrative criminal activity and turned it into an enterprise.

Considering that smoking is almost absolutely addictive, by banning smoking completely (i.e. making smoking illegal) suddenly the law would "create" a new criminal element, the "smoker", who cannot give it up so readily (if he could, he'd probably would have quit!) This would "force" otherwise law-abiding citizens to learn how to circumvent and break the law to obtain what they desire, in this case cigarettes.

Source:
http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/522.html

Smoking already has an underground element, even though it is completely legal to smoke. For example, in NYS it is illegal to purchase cigarettes outside of the state without paying the NYS Cigarette Tax, which is now $1.50 a pack. Add to this the NYC Cigarette Tax, also $1.50, and you have a $3.00 Cigarette Tax BEFORE Sales Tax and Federal Tax. A pack of cigarettes in NYC is about $6.80, but only one county away (either Nassau or Westchester Counties) the same cigarettes are $1.50 less, or about $5.30 a pack. Yet buying cigarettes in Westchester County and taking them into the Bronx (an activity that happens on a large scale daily as commuters who smoke and live in Westchester and work in the city would often do) are literally BREAKING NYC LAW by transporting these cigarettes across county lines without paying this extra tax!

sources:
http://www.tax.state.ny.us/press/archive/1999/smuggle.htm
http://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/fiscal/cigreport.pdf (page 14-15 -- Excise Tax)

You provide no proof that smoking [cigarettes] is as harmful as any other drug. I submit it is not, certainly not in the short term, and compared to many other drugs, it is either more harmful or less harmful, depending on what you compare it to.

Furthermore, you ask why we allow it. Perhaps you've forgotten that the USA is a democracy which [supposedly] allows us to make our own decisions, INCLUDING BAD DECISIONS. We've learned that we have to be afforded the opportunity to make mistakes in order to learn and improve. (This is the main reason "zero-defects" policies fail miserably). By making smoking illegal, you are sentencing a portion of the population to a life of crime, which helps no one.

For you Liberals who believe smoking should be banned, whatever happened to "live and let live" and "its my body, I should be allowed to make my own choices about it."?

For you Conservatives who believe smoking should be banned, whatever happened to the notion as a lower tax rate is proven to increase revenue and allowing the free market to determine what to sell and for what price?

In other words, "what are you guys smoking"?

Answer 5

Should Beer and Alcoholic Beverages be Banned??? Should Pharmaceutical Drugs that are being taken illegally as drugs such as Oxycontin be Banned??? Should these Controlled Substances be Banned, they are afterall more harmful to self and others than a little ol' Cigarette* could ever be!!! Re-evaluate your Opinions

Answer 6

I think that if they are going to ban cigarettes then alcohol should be banned. They banned everything else... why not? Because of $$$... and because obviously banning doesn't work, just look at when alcohol was banned... didn't work. Today other drugs are banned... didn't work.
Bottom line, big tobacco has crazy $$$ and will never be banned.

Answer 7

No.

The government has no right, no authority to protect us from ourselves. If the people choose to smoke, that is their own business. The risks have been known for well over a century.

Perhaps people need to stop using the power of government to protect us from ourselves, and try to let us have liberty and freedom. The worst tyrants in the world are do-gooders.

Answer 8

Only if we ban cars.
Cigarette smoke won't even make a little, itty, bitty, blip on the pollution radar.
Yet again, who makes this stuff an issue?
I do see your point though, it puts a hefty burden on the health care system.

Answer 9

No.

Should drinking be banned too? What about drinking soda? Or caffeine? What about eating fast food, shouldn't that be banded too?

At some point you have to stop trying to babysit the world and let people make their own choices and let them live with the consequences.

Answer 10

Cigarettes vs. drugs, drugs vs. guns, alcohol vs. drugs, chemicals in our food vs. cloning....i can think of many other things that are or could be harmful to humans....would you like for them all to be banned too?
We don't "allow" it....it's their right to smoke.