Health experts say axing plan to block sales of tobacco products to next generation will cost thousands of lives

  • Dran@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Would you support a law that said public healthcare is unavailable to those who choose to smoke? That would seem to be a reasonable compromise.

    • idiomaddict@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      I would want to support that, but with a lot of caveats. If there were no chance of a shortage of hospital beds, and people were grandfathered in and given plenty of warning. There’s also the fact that it’s basically impossible to enforce. It would be easy and strongly incentivized to lie about and very difficult and expensive to investigate.

      It’s also morally difficult, because one cigarette doesn’t cause cancer. I can absolutely see people who aren’t regular smokers and who aren’t increasing their chances of illness bumming a cigarette once a decade- should they lose access to healthcare? I don’t really think so (because the goal isn’t to punish smokers, but to protect non smokers), but I don’t know how you could write a law that would protect them.