Incidentally, I would love to be able to ban tobacco cigarettes if it were at all practical. Are e-cigarettes a good enough substitute that banning them wouldn’t create a huge black market?
Incidentally, tobacco products aren’t an unqualified vice the way alcohol is sometimes argued to be. (I also disagree with that assessment WRT alcohol, but the benefits are smaller and the harms are larger there than they are with tobacco.) They’re better seen as general-purpose OTC psych meds—they’re surprisingly good at ameliorating a wide variety of flavors of things being a bit shit—that have the unfortunate side-effect of dramatically increasing the likelihood that you get cancer.
Absent alternatives, this is probably a worthwhile tradeoff for many people, most of whom are not upper-middle-class sorts who, if neuroatypical, are so in upper-middle-class ways, because things are much less likely to be a bit shit for said sorts; so those sorts (who, if neuroatypical, are so in etc.) keep failing to pick up on this and deciding cigarettes should be banned.
Incidentally, I would love to be able to ban tobacco cigarettes if it were at all practical. Are e-cigarettes a good enough substitute that banning them wouldn’t create a huge black market?
Not IME.
Incidentally, tobacco products aren’t an unqualified vice the way alcohol is sometimes argued to be. (I also disagree with that assessment WRT alcohol, but the benefits are smaller and the harms are larger there than they are with tobacco.) They’re better seen as general-purpose OTC psych meds—they’re surprisingly good at ameliorating a wide variety of flavors of things being a bit shit—that have the unfortunate side-effect of dramatically increasing the likelihood that you get cancer.
Absent alternatives, this is probably a worthwhile tradeoff for many people, most of whom are not upper-middle-class sorts who, if neuroatypical, are so in upper-middle-class ways, because things are much less likely to be a bit shit for said sorts; so those sorts (who, if neuroatypical, are so in etc.) keep failing to pick up on this and deciding cigarettes should be banned.
Taxing cigarettes already create a black market in cigarettes today.