Holy smokes!

The UK wants to end smoking. That’s good — but its new law also raises questions about freedom and choice

King James I of England hated tobacco. He even wrote a pamphlet called A Counterblaste to Tobacco, where he said smoking was “hateful to the nose” and “dangerous to the lungs.” So when King Charles III signs the UK’s new Tobacco and Vapes Bill, James’s 400-year-old wish for a smoke-free Britain will come closer to coming true.

That sounds like a good idea. The World Health Organization says tobacco kills about 7 million people every year. In India alone, about 1.3 million people die from it. In Britain, around 10% of adults smoke, and this leads to about 64,000 deaths a year. Also, about three-quarters of British smokers say they wish they had never started. So the government clearly has strong reasons to step in.

But the new UK law is unusual. It plans to create a “tobacco-free generation” by banning the sale of cigarettes to anyone born after January 1, 2009. This means that in the future, there will be two kinds of adults in the UK: older adults who are allowed to smoke, and younger adults who are not. This raises tricky questions. If both groups are adults, why should only one be allowed to choose? And what if, someday, a law says people born after a certain date can’t use cash, drive cars, vote for a certain party, or change their religion?

There’s another problem. The law will take a very long time to fully work. Women in Britain live to about 83 years on average. If that doesn’t change, the country may not become completely tobacco-free until around 2092. That’s many decades away.

New Zealand tried a similar rule in 2022, but later cancelled it after a change of government. Some people said tobacco companies supported a campaign called “Save Our Stores” to get rid of the law. The same kind of pressure may happen in the UK, where people have been smoking tobacco since at least the 1500s.

Stronger steps — like higher taxes and strict limits on advertising — might reduce smoking faster. It would be like the famous story of Walter Raleigh’s servant throwing a bucket of water on him when he first saw him smoking. The servant thought Raleigh was on fire. King James I would probably have approved of that.

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