It also feels like smugglers helping regular smokers get discounts on their habit are the wrong model, since the target for the ban is young people who generally don’t [yet]have a smoking addiction. Basically everyone else buys cigarettes legally in convenience stores and teenagers already barely smoke them with the trend being steeply downwards since the turn of the century. Kids who don’t have a smoking habit and increasingly aren’t interested in trying are barely a demand factor for underground cigarettes, especially since they can also obtain them by asking an older person to purchase it in a regular convenience store, same as 15 year olds wanting to experiment with cigarettes and alcohol have done for years. .
It’s just it places more of a barrier to them getting it regularly in quantities likely to become habit-forming, and ultimately apart from being highly addictive when people do that tobacco doesn’t have much appeal as a drug, offering minimal high and being something grandma smokes and teen idols don’t, so it really doesn’t seem like something that a few years down the line is going to result in speakeasies full of chainsmoking twentysomethings or a new sideline for dealers in cocaine.
It also feels like smugglers helping regular smokers get discounts on their habit are the wrong model, since the target for the ban is young people who generally don’t [yet]have a smoking addiction. Basically everyone else buys cigarettes legally in convenience stores and teenagers already barely smoke them with the trend being steeply downwards since the turn of the century. Kids who don’t have a smoking habit and increasingly aren’t interested in trying are barely a demand factor for underground cigarettes, especially since they can also obtain them by asking an older person to purchase it in a regular convenience store, same as 15 year olds wanting to experiment with cigarettes and alcohol have done for years. .
It’s just it places more of a barrier to them getting it regularly in quantities likely to become habit-forming, and ultimately apart from being highly addictive when people do that tobacco doesn’t have much appeal as a drug, offering minimal high and being something grandma smokes and teen idols don’t, so it really doesn’t seem like something that a few years down the line is going to result in speakeasies full of chainsmoking twentysomethings or a new sideline for dealers in cocaine.