Smoking

[emjay]

For me, as for many others I'd assume, it was peer pressure and thinking it was cool, that started me smoking at 15, and then, like I said, various delusional beliefs that maintained that addiction for over twenty years after that. Now that I'm free of it, the thing that angers me most is how it is and was targeted at young people, same with vaping. So in my ideal world, if smoking/vaping has to remain legal, I'd at least want the age it could be purchased raised to maybe 25 or something... so that people could make a truly informed choice, not influenced at all by immature social pressures. As I understand it, the smoking age in Britain is 18 now, when it used to be 16; that's definitely an improvement, but I still think 18 is way too young, because I think those sorts of social pressures are or can be still very influential at that age. I think if the age were raised to something like 25, then it would all but stamp out the uptake of smoking/vaping in this and future generations, not just from the point of people being more mentally mature so as to make informed decisions, but also it's much harder for young people to pass for 25 than it is for them to pass for 18, when trying to buy it in a shop.

It's hard to have consistency with age limits.
25 to smoke.  But then shouldn't we use the same argument to say 25 for tattoos?  Drinking?  Credit debt?  Marriage?  And so on.
Dunno.  It's just hard to settle on good ages for things that seem consistent as well as reasonable.

I think smoking deserves to be higher, as it leads to strong addiction, and undeniable cumulative health consequences, and is as I said specifically (and arguably cynically) targeted/marketed at young people. Marriage can be reversed, debt can be reversed, but the damage of smoking cannot. I suppose you could argue also for a similar age for drinking, but it is far more possible to 'drink in moderation' than it is to 'smoke in moderation'; the latter doesn't really exist IMO, it's all going to be cumulative damage, slowly creeping up on you as you get older, however much you smoke. I know you're still enamoured of it, and I don't know how old you are but from this thread I would assume you're quite young, but however cool or 'aesthetically pleasing' it may seem, you can't escape the damage it does, which creeps up slowly on you as the years go by.