No Smoking Regulations

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Government regulation of so-called vices is really a hot potato. At first they seem eminently reasonable. Put the monetary price high enough, scare people to death and ostracize them and they’ll all quit smoking right now. This is the school marm approach to vice and bad habits in general. But there are lots of things wrong with this approach. Here are just a few.

Addiction isn’t rational

That means that any anti-smoking initiative that appeals to logic is doomed to failure. The conscious mind knows very well that smoking is evil, but it can’t overpower the messages coming from the other parts of the brain that don’t know anything about logic. The parts of the brain that really run things on a minute to minute to minute basis speak the language of emotion and physical satisfaction, not logic. In the end, the other three parts of the brain have to be brought into synch with the conscious mind by some means. Nothing else will do the job.

Backlash or Blowback

If you push people they push back. The backlash may come in the form of defiance or crime but it always comes. People simply won’t accept control imposed from outside. The classic illustration of this is prohibition. Or you can look at how much actual good has been accomplished by the war on drugs. After all the money and the build-up of police power drug use is still a growing problem. So the war approach hasn’t worked out.

The retort to that is to say that things would be a lot worse if the war on drugs never took place, and that retort is impossible to refute. You simply can’t prove a negative. All you can do is point to other areas where they tried different approaches and show that conditions there are better.

Raising the Price Won’t Work

There is a school of thought that says if smoking is made expensive enough then people will be forced to quit. The sad fact is, though, that people always find ways to indulge their vices. People don’t smoke to save money, obviously. The price of cigarettes is already more than 90% tax. Smokers know this, so raising the price just pisses them off. It makes them much more likely to buy black-market cigs and feel good about doing it. It’s a way of giving authority a black eye and saving money.

Another reason that raising the price is ineffectual is that it induces a personality split in government itself. The government makes a lot of money by so called sin taxes. If everybody quit smoking, drinking and gambling tomorrow there would be very little government revenue. So the people in power overall don’t want people to quit. Couple this with the fact that government and the tobacco industry are joined at the hip, especially in terms of campaign contributions and you can understand all kinds of things. Like why government is so opposed to the more healthful electronic cigarettes. I suspect the biggest reason is that the nicotine e-cigs dispense doesn’t come from tobacco. Things will probably be different if the tobacco industry finds some way to get its fingers into the pie.