However, these other “sins” have at least some advantage. We need gasoline, we need to eat, even if we occasionally do it in fast food restaurants, alcohol in moderation has benefits, and moderation gaming is entertaining for some. However, there is no moderation in tobacco. There is no level at which tobacco smoke is safe for the user or those around them or, as we see, even for those exposed in a tertiary environment (5). What should we be more concerned about: the fairly widespread legal use of alcohol and tobacco, or illegal drugs? Most people would answer that last question, but they would be wrong. A new study has found that the burden of death and disease falls heavily on alcohol and tobacco, both of which are legal and enjoyed by a significant portion of the population. It is surprising to me that we are still on the road to prohibition with psychoactive substances (which include both alcohol and tobacco). It`s not working. This was not the case in the 1920s, but not today with the war on drugs. It`s expensive and it is.

No. Work. Yet all of these deaths have not inspired President Donald Trump or presidents before him to formally declare a public health emergency on tobacco or alcohol, as Trump finally did Thursday for opioids. We don`t often call alcohol or tobacco “epidemics,” even though we regularly use the same language for opioids, which are linked to a fraction of deaths from alcohol or tobacco. Federal and state laws criminalize the sale or supply of tobacco products to anyone under the age of 18. It is also illegal for people under the age of 18 to purchase tobacco products.9 For the industry, the U.S. experience with alcohol prohibition has always been entirely negative, although reports suggest that – as a measure to reduce the negative health and social effects of alcohol consumption – it was actually effective and very popular with the public. at least initially.10 27 Prohibition is therefore based on a misinterpretation of history and a mistaken equivalence of alcohol and tobacco.10 27 28 But it has also become an abbreviation for something more sinister: the idea that governments cannot be trusted to act in the interests of the people. Simon Chapman and others have pointed out that the “nanny state” has saved countless lives through policies that are now mostly taken for granted.28 29 In wealthier parts of the world, we assume that our water is clean and that sewage is properly disposed of; We live with factory stack emission controls and building codes that are essentially “prohibitions”.29 Powerful corporations often resist efforts to impose such protections – think of the time it took to remove lead from children`s toy paint,30 and the difficulty of limiting greenhouse gas emissions.31 Condemning the abstract “ban,” effectively serves the interests of polluting industries. weakening trust in public health governance. Cigarette manufacturers also tend to associate the prohibition of sale with the restriction or punishment of personal use, allowing them to present the proponents of a sales ban as a restriction of individual freedoms.

Cigarette companies are using this confusion as a weapon to divide the tobacco control community and make any path to effective abolition “impossible”. A clear symptom of the twisted thinking that dominates much of our country`s current culture is that you may be allowed by the state to legally kill people over the age of 18 (i.e. as a member of the armed forces), but you cannot legally drink after doing so (i.e., when you go home, say, to Massachusetts). You can be severely maimed for life as a member of the armed forces at age 18, but you can`t drink a legal drink for pain relief (in Massachusetts). You are considered mature enough to vote for the election of the President of the United States, which could plunge us into another war, including nuclear war, but you cannot legally drink before or after. We should go back to that brief period during the Vietnam War, when the legal drinking age and voting age were set at 18. Again, if the state allows you, or even encourages you, to kill or be killed in its name at the age of 18, then surely it should allow you to drink legally at 18. As for raising the legal smoking age to 21, I will agree once the government imposes new bans on the fast food chains that are causing the obesity epidemic in the country (which could drive up health care costs for all of us even more than smoking).

and stricter controls on carbon emissions from vehicles and factories. which also have a great impact on our collective health. SUVs and other fuel consumers should be banned completely. As wrong as it is to underestimate Big Tobacco`s power, it`s also wrong to exaggerate it. In 2021, 148 public health organizations around the world called on governments to develop plans to phase out cigarette sales, and others presented plans to significantly reduce retail sales.53 54 Even in the United States, where the industry remains influential nationally, local communities and/or state governments have the full power — and legal right — to stop the sale of cigarettes. There is a strong precedent for such prosecutions, dating back more than 100 years, when the U.S. Supreme Court in Austin v. Tennessee (1900) upheld the right of a state or local community to abolish the sale of cigarettes. From 1890 to 1927, 16 U.S. states managed to ban the sale (and sometimes the manufacture) of cigarettes without much protest about deprivation of liberty – with the exception of protests from regular suspects.55 More recently, there have been many local attempts to stop the sale of cigarettes, some of which would have been successful if public health agencies had been less frightened by the specter of Prohibition.56 Alcohol and tobacco policies arouse considerable public interest and can be surrounded by considerable controversy. This special thematic series aims to bring together a selection of the latest research and developments around global alcohol and tobacco policy from different perspectives.