I don’t see why tobacco products, which can only cause you sickness and death, should ever be legal and so readily available. And I say that as an ex-smoker of about a decade, who absolutely loved smoking, in the interest of openness. There is no ‘medicinal’ use in the way that you can claim so about certain alcohols, or certain types of marijuana (yet it’s banned in many parts of the world). All it does is slowly kill you and make you sick along the way. Do we need that? Do we need anything that we now know can only harm us? Aren’t we supposed to be an advanced species capable of learning and applying new knowledge? Once we realise something is toxic and can only cause harm, do we not have a duty to use our cognitive thinking to eliminate it? It seems strange to me that a big chunk of humans as a species want to protect their right to knowingly make bad decisions, and again, I say that as someone who has caught themselves doing so many times in their life, and constantly strived to get better in that department. If we sat and watched a load of monkeys purposefully and repeatedly doing things that they know only does them harm, and in some cases kills them slowly and painfully, we would be dismayed at their stupidity and there would probably be protestors saying that somebody should step in and take those things away from them. So I find it weird that when we are the monkeys, we don’t always want to do the same thing.
I am of course being intentionally extreme with my analogy (to a point), although I do stand by the core principle of what I’m saying. Parents let their kids make their own decisions on a lot of matters, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, but they usually learn from getting it wrong and adjust their boundaries moving forward, and there are certain things where they go, “absolutely not, never on my watch” and that’s that. So why can’t a government, assuming the role of the parent, do the same when it knows that there is no benefit to the citizen? Does it not have a duty to eliminate something that only has negative consequences with absolutely zero upsides? Why would it want to protect the threat?
Processed foods is vastly different, as that’s often a poverty issue. I was raised in a very poor environment where highly processed, often frozen food was our only way to eat and therefore survive. It’s not good for you and as time goes on it’s obvious that long term it leads to huge cancer increases (when I was a kid the adverts used to say one in four people would get cancer in their lifetime, now they all say one in two), but for some people it’s all they have access to. That’s the thing we need to worry about and ultimately change - access and affordability to decent quality food. Should we get rid of processed foods entirely? In principle and purely on paper, absolutely 100%, but there’s a lot more at stake and a lot more to figure out before you can just turn the tap off. You can’t compare smoking to eating crap food as one of them serves no essential purpose - if you don’t smoke a cigarette it’ll never impact you negatively in any way, but if you don’t eat food and your only option in the form of cheap and nasty stuff is removed then you’ll die. Sure, many people can afford to not eat processed food and still choose to, but you can’t do much about that unless you’re wanting to dish out poverty cards and only allow carriers to purchase it. That’s where you hope that education steps in to minimise poor choice alongside unfortunate necessity, but where is the necessity with a cigarette? What would anyone really protect cigarettes for? Because of free choice? Cool - where’s my free choice to buy a safe and tested strain of marijuana from a licensed dispensary, which I know can’t cause me any biological or psychological harm (as well as providing tax revenue) because it’s government grown and has undergone extensive testing? Where’s my choice to buy a line of cocaine that I know has been equally and safely prepared and poses no risk of being mixed and diluted with concrete, or any other foreign powders? What’s so special about cigarettes that they need protecting?
I do understand the point that you raise in principle, and the suggestion that things like this can seem like slippery slopes and pose questions of where you draw lines moving forward, and I’m really not an advocate for a supreme nanny state or dictatorship. I do think that education is key to most issues, and I don’t know how it’ll go down in NZ. I guess nobody will know for decades to come, and even if they have the right call on paper they might have the wrong method. But I do personally think that when it comes to something that we know has absolutely zero trade off, zero upside and can only and exclusively cause illness, suffering and death, it’s not that outrageous for someone to go, “Why do we allow this again?” Cigarettes are pretty rare in that case. I can’t think of many other things that can only be used to poison yourself, which have no other use and possess not even the smallest potential benefit. You can only smoke them and they can only make you sick or kill you.
It’s probably a good thing that the debate has been opened up though, right? Feels good to have some sort of conversational exchange that isn’t about trade deals and flag shagging.