Move to raise legal age for smoking is just a gesture
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The telling bit about the article on raising the age at which people can legally smoke to 20 is that the glaringly lethal effects of smoking kill 50,000 addicts every year, equivalent to a major war.
Compared to fatalities attributed to illegal drugs, this puts matters into perspective.
This change is transparently unworkable, and is little more than gesture politics. The ostensibly sensible answer would be to completely ban cigarettes, which is also unworkable as prohibition in the US demonstrated. That measure would group these products in the same category as, say, marijuana and hand the market over to criminal gangs. Now that would never do, would it?
Simon Ordsall
