ASH (with the support of the Mirror) calls time on young adults smoking
Friday, August 6, 2021 at 10:15 The Mirror reports that ‘plans to raise the legal age of buying tobacco to 21’ are being looked at by ‘health officials’.
The 'exclusive' report is accompanied by a leading article in which the paper throws its weight behind the idea.
The fingerprints of ASH are all over the story so I was surprised to be asked to respond.
In fact the Mirror asked for 200 words to be published alongside a comment from ASH. Neither is online but this is my (edited) contribution:
If you can have sex at 16 and drive a car at 17, you should be allowed to buy tobacco at 18.
In the eyes of the law, you’re an adult at 18. Treating young adults like children insults their intelligence.
You certainly don’t have to be 21 to know that smoking is potentially harmful.
But raising the age of sale won’t stop young people smoking. It will simply drive tobacco underground.
Far from protecting younger consumers, it will expose more to illicit and counterfeit tobacco, origin unknown.
In response ASH CEO Deborah Arnott wrote:
Simon Clark, whose organisation, Forest, is funded by tobacco firms, says if you’re old enough to have sex at 16 or join the Army, you’re old enough to smoke. But he’s wrong.
Cut to the Mirror’s leading article:
Every anti-smoking measure was at first opposed by the tobacco lobby.
A rule of thumb is that the louder the criticism of laws intended to save lives, the more effective they are likely to be.
Call me cynical but I wonder if Deborah wrote that as well!
Reader Comments (3)
"But he’s wrong."
Well that settles that then...
Remember the days when the Mirror supported and voiced the concerns of the little people instead of powerful overpaid lobbyists using charity status as a front?
I just hope that Boris's Government isn't taken in by this but as it appears to be blind to what the public wants, it will just have to learn the hard way like Labour, which has never won an election since the imposition of the draconian blanket smoking ban which began its demise and lost it the working class vote and "the poor" which appears to be a group of people whose only purpose is to exist for the likes of the Mirror and it's buddies in ASH to patronise and claim ownership of.
Remember too all those smokerphobic politicians like LibDem Stephen Williams who got booted out because people were sick of his campaign to remove their consumer rights with plain packs?
People do not like being preached to, controlled, harrassed or persecuted, or being made to fund the salaries of wealthy lobbyists when they earn so little, and in truth, most people other than the middle class snobs in the Mirror's boardroom, couldn't give a damn about this issue.
However, the public is beginning to recognise that smoking and other lifestyle tyranny is no longer about health but politics and used as the template in which public health intends to suck the joy out of life and living by transfering the scaremongering of smoking and tobacco to other products as well as trawling in more sin taxes for the Treasury.
Tobacco control is a lucrative grift. The alleged public health benefits are secondary and elusive--since the interventions are often symbolic and contradicted by actual evidence.