Whisper it, but Liz Truss could be right in her opposition to Rishi Sunak’s smoking ban | Simon Jenkins
At least twice as many students smoke cannabis as smoke tobacco. Cannabis is illegal, tobacco is legal. If legality meant anything, the numbers would have to be the exact opposite.
Smoking, like alcohol and narcotics, is both pleasurable and harmful. It is the job of the state to regulate the balance. Health education, along with push measures such as banning smoking in public places, has steadily reduced tobacco consumption since 2000. The number of smokers has fallen from 20% to 13% of the population over the past ten years. The only alarming development is the use of vaping by children; now more than 20% of 11 to 17 year olds say they triedTherefore, the proposed restriction on flavored vapes is long overdue and rightly targets manufacturers who blatantly promote them to teenagers. How effective it would be remains to be seen.
However, Rishi Sunak’s plan to completely ban the sale of tobacco for everyone who comes of age is bizarre. Cigarettes will become a kind of way station between vaping and cannabis. They will create a widening gap between two classes of adults: those who were 18 or younger today, and an annually shrinking group of legal buyers who can prove their age at a tobacconist, presumably with a passport.
Tory Libertarians, led by Liz Truss, may use clichΓ©s about nanny states β mostly depending on who gets to be a nanny β but the proposition rings hollow. Imposing arbitrary age limits on shoppers for what will remain the legal activity of smoking is classic Home Office control freak. Dodging will be easy. The takeover will only be an inconvenience. Black markets will flourish and the main victims will be shopkeepers and tax collectors. This is partly why a similar proposal in New Zealand recently collapsed.
The fallacy of limiting consumption of a product by trying to limit supply is a standard economics problem. It doesn’t limit demand, it just increases the price. Half a century of Britain’s supply-obsessed “war on drugs” is proof enough of that, as are America’s attempts to ban alcohol. Tobacco use in Britain is declining β despite leveling off during the coronavirus crisis β largely due to public health and education concerns. Let it continue to fall.
Meanwhile, as the central government takes control of what will become a costly and bureaucratic tobacco ban directorate, it is reining in the only initiative that has clearly proven effective. The Health Foundation reports Those cuts have reduced funding going to the council’s “stop smoking” services by 45%. This is centralist government policy at its most counterproductive.
In terms of priorities, the policy is even crazier. The cost to the NHS of smoking-related diseases β calculated at a certain amount Β£3 billion per year β is half the cost of obesity. Yet the government is being tough on the food lobby over a condition that now affects more than a quarter of the British population. This certainly deserves the status of a crisis. But what are the chances that Rishi Sunak will ban the sale of pizzas and donuts to under-18s?