• @_number8_
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    1129 months ago

    aside from the issue of ‘prohibition still doesn’t work’, i don’t think giving kids or “underage” adults criminal charges for cigarettes is making anything better for anyone

    • BolexForSoup
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      9 months ago

      Smoking age is specifically the ability to purchase. There are no criminal/civil charges for underage smoking. The crimes are specifically 1) selling to minors 2) buying for minors.

      TL;DR: No one goes/will go to jail for underage smoking. They won’t even get in trouble for buying. The onus is on the vendor OR the legal purchaser who handed them off.

      • Melkath
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        -249 months ago

        Incorrect.

        A black market is created, kids still smoke, but poor people making a buck selling to kids go to jail.

        It doesn’t fix the issue and syphons poor people into prisons.

          • Melkath
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            -69 months ago

            Prohibition laws do put people in prison.

            “Noone goes to prison for underage smoking”. False. The people selling the cigarettes, poor people trying to make a buck, go to jail for the underage smoking.

            I suggest we do nothing.

            Prohibition doesn’t work.

            Mind your own business.

              • Melkath
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                -59 months ago

                You’re just being purposefully obtuse now.

                No. The kids aren’t the ones going to prison, but the prohibition laws do send people to prison.

                  • Melkath
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                    9 months ago

                    No. I am pointing out that you are making two conflicting statements.

                    You are doing mental gymnastics.

                    Back to the point “Noone goes to prison for underage smoking”. Yes they do. When you make prohibition laws creating the concept of “underage smoking” you ARE sending SOMEONE to prison.

                • @[email protected]
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                  9 months ago

                  No one but you is being obtuse here.

                  You “corrected” someone by making an entirely different point from the one they made. In fact, the person you said was “wrong” actually stated the very thing you did.

                  No one is saying your point is wrong. Just that it isn’t a correction.

            • @[email protected]
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              -19 months ago

              I would argue that society should reserve the right to punish individuals who harm others for their personal benefit.

              And I would argue that selling a physically addictive substance that directly causes harm with no benefit to the user for personal profit is causing harm.

              So while I don’t support arresting people for smoking, I 100% so support arresting people for selling.

              • Melkath
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                39 months ago

                Again, I just see mental gymnastics.

                So you just outright said that people should be free to smoke, but anyone who sells what is being smoked should be incarcerated.

                How is that not a complete oxymoron?

                No. You have a factually flawed bias against a thing, and you want to mob up with other people to enforce your opinions and will upon people you disagree with.

                As a result, you want to imprison poor people and not accomplish what you claim to want to accomplish.

                • @[email protected]
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                  29 months ago

                  There is no oxymoron.

                  Smoking is harming oneself.

                  Selling is harming another.

                  They are not equivalent.

          • Melkath
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            19 months ago

            Happy you are for the siphoning of poor people to for profit prisons.

            Really sounds like your plan to eradicate tobacco from existing is solid.

        • @[email protected]OPM
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          -99 months ago

          How do you propose this black market gets created? In theory, no new addicts would get created because the smoking age rises in lockstep with the people themselves.

          • ddh
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            139 months ago

            They should raise the heroin age

          • @[email protected]
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            69 months ago

            There is already a black/gray marked near many schools (for the younger, there are cigarettes and for the older there is weed.) it’s a market where there is just one person selling, it is more a fluid market where the young people sell and buy to each other, mostly there are multiple kids with connections to get the goods in any school and then it rotates through the different kids by selling, buying, stealing etc. Source: I’m 26 now, and don’t believe that has changed since I left school.

          • SaltySalamander
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            49 months ago

            You really have a surface-level understanding of how the world works, I take it.

    • genoxidedev1
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      89 months ago

      I know this is pretty radical, but if we made smoking FFA way fewer people should theoretically start smoking in the first place. From my experience when I was still at school most of the people there were only smoking because it’s “cool”, making smoking legal for everyone should take the coolness factor away at least.

      • Melkath
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        -29 months ago

        Please, oh dear god…

        Please tell me what FFA means and how it doesn’t amount to “send poor people to prison”.

        • genoxidedev1
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          19 months ago

          FFA just means “free for all” (it’s a term from competitive games, in case you shouldn’t know), in this context I used it as another word for ‘legal’.

          • Melkath
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            19 months ago

            Oh thank god.

            Yes, I 100 percent agree with you. Your thought process is the way.

            Sorry I was so adversarial in my first comment. A lot of the rest of this thread has me all sorts of triggered.