Should we ban cigarettes forever? [View all]

[Playinghardball]

By John Tozzi, Businessweek

Doctors in the U.K. voted on Tuesday to support a "campaign to ban forever the sale of cigarettes to any individual born after the year 2000."

It's an appealing thought exercise for public health types: Smoking rates declined steadily in the late 20th century as the health hazards became more widely understood.

So what would happen if children born in the 2000s -- those just now hitting their years of tobacco experimentation -- were barred from buying cigarettes not just until they reach adulthood, but forever?

The flaws in this prohibition-by-gener​ation proposal aren't hard to detect. Children under 16 were barred from buying cigarettes in England and Wales until 2007, when the age was raised to 18 (PDF), as it is in most of the U.S.. Despite widespread bans on sales of cigarettes to kids, kids still try smoking cigarettes, and some get hooked.

The author of the motion before the British Medical Association acknowledged as much to The Guardian. "Cigarette smoking is specifically a choice made by children that results in addiction in adulthood," public health specialist Tim Crocker-Buque told the paper. "Eighty percent of people who smoke start as teenagers . . . The idea of this proposal is to prevent those children who are not smoking from taking up smoking."

Prohibition -- the U.S. policy toward alcohol in the 1920s and toward many drugs today -- has its own problems. It tends to create a black market trade that carries its own social costs.

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