For almost two decades, British retailers have told customers that if they were born after the current date 18 years ago, they can’t buy cigarettes. Starting next year, that date will freeze. Under a recently passed law, selling cigarettes to anyone born on or after January 1, 2009, will be illegal—in perpetuity. As long as the law is in effect, no one who is 17 or younger on New Year’s Day 2027 will ever be allowed to buy tobacco legally.
This generational tobacco ban represents a very different approach from the tobacco-control policy that most Americans are used to. The U.S. regime looks more like what the drug-policy scholar Mark Kleiman called “grudging toleration” toward cigarettes: tax, regulate, and scold, but stop short of outright bans. The new British approach will, eventually, lead to outright prohibition.
Prohibition. The word conjures the specter of violence, crime, and policy failure. But the United Kingdom isn’t the first jurisdiction to impose a generational ban, and it probably won’t be the last. The tiny island nation of the Maldives did so in November. New Zealand passed one in 2022, but a new governing coalition took power and repealed the law before it could go into effect. Here in the United States, 22 towns in Massachusetts, beginning with the Boston suburb of Brookline, have passed a generational ban, a possible precursor to statewide legislation.
[Conor Friedersdorf: The U.K. smoking ban is illiberal]
The spread of such prohibitions raises the counterintuitive possibility that tobacco bans are in fact a consequence of grudging toleration, rather than a departure from it. Decades of legal intolerance have steadily eroded the user base and cultural support that justified legality in the first place. Stigmatizing smoking, in other words, seems to have created the basis for an outright ban. That dynamic has implications not just for tobacco, but for the many addictive products now dominating a growing share of our economy, including social-media and gambling apps. As addictive designs grow more and more common, prohibition might come back into style.
A crackdown on cigarettes has certainly been a long time coming. As late as 1974, at least 40 percent of Americans were smokers. But that figure declined steadily over the next half century. Today, just one in 10 Americans is a smoker.
Policy changes helped create that cultural shift. In 1964, the surgeon general publicly warned that smoking causes cancer; advertising bans and mandatory labels soon followed. After that came “clean air” laws and municipal smoking bans and then, in the late 1990s, the $200 billion settlement between tobacco companies and the states.
Throughout this process, American policy makers did everything short of actually banning cigarettes themselves. Instead of prohibiting them, we took a “public health” middle ground, allowing people to indulge their vice if they chose to, while heavily discouraging smoking and proscribing who could buy cigarettes and where they could do so.
To an extent, this worked. But smoking still kills roughly half a million Americans a year, nearly seven times as many as those who die from a drug overdose. Death is a trailing indicator, and the decline in the smoking population should eventually mean fewer deaths. But even in 2035, one analysis found, more than 160,000 current smokers are projected to die from their habit.
At this point, the returns on public-health messaging and social stigma might be bottoming out. Does anyone still smoking Marlboros not know by now that cigarettes can kill them? But precisely because of the success of policies that stopped short of prohibition, the constituency of voters who would oppose a ban has dwindled. Indeed, a 2023 poll found that a majority of Americans would support banning all tobacco products. Legal stigmatization produced cultural judgment that, in turn, may eventually acquire the force of law.
Of course, there are plenty of reasons America might not follow the United Kingdom. The U.K.’s socialized health-care system means that the costs of smoking are more directly borne by the taxpayer. Americans are more individualistic and suspicious of government than the British. Still unclear is whether the U.K. policy experiment will work, in the sense of reducing smoking’s total harm. Some of the people prohibited from buying cigarettes legally will do so illegally, whether with the help of a friend born before 2009 or through black markets. Such markets can and do generate crime. We don’t have enough research yet to judge if the costs will be worth the benefits.
[Nicholas Florko: What’s so bad about nicotine?]
Still, the results of the U.K. tobacco ban and similar efforts might offer lessons beyond those related to smoking. America is beset by a variety of addictive products that seem difficult to contain using the delicate instruments of public health. For example, in a landmark ruling last month, a jury determined that Meta and YouTube must pay a woman $6 million for the damage that their products did to her as a child. The plaintiff’s case was built on the idea that social media’s addictiveness is a defective product design, the same argument made about tobacco decades ago. The Public Health Advocacy Institute—whose president, Richard Daynard, pioneered the litigation strategy—has recently brought similar suits against sportsbooks and prediction markets.
These and other addictive products were initially met with enthusiasm; many are now facing backlash. In each case, the moderate position is to endorse some degree of regulation while stopping short of being so crude as to ban something harmful outright. But if the experience of tobacco is instructive, then stigmatizing, taxing, and regulating something for long enough can eventually create the conditions for an outright ban.
Prohibition has been a dirty word in American public policy since the Twenty-First Amendment passed. But as the Carnegie Mellon professor Jonathan Caulkins has observed, American jurisdictions successfully prohibit the sale of products such as fireworks and raw milk on a regular basis. Should we be squeamish about doing so for other things? As with cigarettes, the age of half measures and cautious regulation may soon be over.
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