New Zealand - you gotta be this old to have rights.

[emjay]

Cigarettes vs alcohol.


I have never seen someone go home, smoke cigarettes for hours then beat the shit out of the wife and kids...

...

Okay, fair enough, I didn't think of that... though I should've done I guess, since alcoholism did have a negative, indirect, affect on our family for a long time (in the sense of trying to help an alcoholic over a long period, but it just tearing the family apart in many ways, co-dependency and all this sort of thing)... I'd just forgotten about it... and I'm no particular fan of the stuff myself, only having it a few times a year.

So yeah, in line with what you're saying, alcohol sucks for how it can affect others as well as the person afflicted, smoking, much less so, or at least only in the second hand smoking sense, which is largely protected against within the law.

So I guess I don't know how to square that, just that I'm happy to see this happen with tobacco, because even if it does not generally affect others... or there's easy/easier protections from that... it still has only negative... and completely avoidable... consequences for anyone who takes it up, and as I said, generally most people that do take it up, do so before they can make a fully mature/unpressured decision... so to the extent that this would stamp out that, I'm good with that.

Alcohol would still be a much more complicated issue I think, because it's not so clear-cut negative, but yeah, what you've said is definitely food for thought.