Well, in the UK at least, particularly in England, according to a new report. The British currently have the second lowest smoking rate in Europe after Sweden, and only slightly higher than the USA, and rapidly falling for the past several years. And if current trends of the past five years continue, smoking rates will drop below 5% of the adult population (what researchers define as a "smoke-free" country) by 2030. Given that nearly half of British adults smoked in the early 1970s, this is no small feat.
And the real kicker? This is all happening without raising the smoking age to 21, as it is currently 18 (just like their drinking age) with no plans to hike it any further. The Tobacco 21 fever currently sweeping the USA by storm simply hasn't caught on over on the other side of the Atlantic. And unlike in the USA, there is no moral panic over vaping either. If anything, Public Health England encourages current smokers to switch to vaping to help them quit. These kinds of ageist American-style moral panics, with very few exceptions, are really quite foreign to them.
And come to think of it, after an initial boom in e-cigarettes for a few years, even vaping is now on the decline as well. It appears that's what happens when you don't turn something like that into a media circus / moral panic / deviancy amplification spiral.
It is things like this that almost make us wish that Britain, our mother country, would just revoke America's hard-won (but subsequently squandered) independence. (Tongue firmly in cheek, of course.)
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People in the United Kingdom understand that youth rights is important. People in the United States are inherently oppressive against young people. The media reflects this sentiment through moral panics which are a disgrace to the TV networks airing them. The movement to raise the smoking age to 21 is an oppressive movement. It is a movement not rooted in reality. It is medical fascism as well as oppression against young adults aged 18-20 years old. I think that the movement to raise the smoking age to 21 is a disgrace and I would like to see that movement die.
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ReplyDeleteAnd that Tobacco 21 movement hopefully will collapse of its own morbidly obese weight, once more people realize that the trends in smoking rates are not significantly different in localites who raised smoking age of 21 versus those who keep it 18. Needham, MA is an outlier, the exception that proves the rule. NYC is a more representative sample of the effects of Tobacco 21 laws--smoking rates did not drop any faster there than the rest of the country since 2013.
ReplyDeleteAs well, the premise of Tobacco 21 is a fallacy. The two tiny towns in Massachusetts should not be used for statistical purposes considering that those ageist laws have been implemented in large cities and states.
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