There’s a lot of fear and uncertainty in the world. Fear is the basis behind conservatism, as is hate.

People are desperate for change from the status quo. The right offer simple answers for very complex questions. No critical thinking required.

There’s a lot of money to be made telling people who are afraid of things new things for them to be afraid of. You could also use it to grab power.

The answer is very simple: Propaganda works. Consistently and very predictably. All those arguments we should have had in the 70’s about “television” were right, instead, cable and streaming won and here we are in the belly of the beast.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Democracy_Union

There are a bunch of groups such as ^this one and they have a lot of money and influence.

There’s no other way to keep the race for the first trillionaire going other than moving towards the right.

Probably because the left doesn’t really have a vision to offer, we should be promoting a better future for all and showing how we can achieve it but instead we’ve got infighting, purity culture, self destructive idealism, and calls for making life harder on regular people in pretty much every way possible.

I’m not sure why this harmful drug is different

work in the smoking section of a restaurant for a bit and the phlegm ball you cough up every morning will be your proof that smoking isn’t just an individual’s choice.

Smoking directly harms people around you even if you just walk by.

There are a few good reasons.

1. cigarettes are more harmful than any of the other harmful drugs you’re referencing, and all of those “harmful drugs” combined.

2. cigarettes were unnecessarily designed to be more harmful and addictive than necessary

3. bans come in many forms and have many uses

I’ll preface this by saying I’m one of those people that think all drugs should be legally regulated and available.

That won’t result in all drugs having equal regulations, just as the regulations for driving a bicycle versus driving a car are different, auto drivers requiring more regulations because of how much more dangerous they are.

Drugs, even the illegal ones, are nowhere near as harmful as cigarettes or kill as many people as cigarettes, and a lot of these drugs may be mixed with a few chemicals, not hundreds.

Magic mushrooms are biologically harmless, for example: shrooms are about half as toxic as caffeine, one of the most common and addictive legal regulated chemicals in the world.

When I talk about supporting this ban on cigarettes, I’m specifically supporting this ban in this country at this time as a good way to show cigarette corporations the consequences of continuing to market a known harmful product at the expense of society.

If that ban had lasted for even a couple of years, the companies would be forced to adapt their manufacturing or even mission statement so that they were producing less harmful cigarettes.

Even with the short amount of time it was active, it’s a clear shot around the bow globally to cigarette companies and other companies purposely using cheaper and more toxic ingredients for their products, telling them that they’re going to have to change what they’re doing.

Because of worldwide lax regulations, the historical popularity of smoking plants, the enormous profit margin, corporate legal lobbying supremacy and modern mercantilism(capitalism), we have the result that at least 7 million people are directly dying every year from a product designed to addict you with toxic compounds and is scientifically, indisputably proven to violently harm you.

We aren’t including plantation slavery, second hand smoke, manufacturing deaths, or any other processes and infrastructures that have gone into propping up the industry

So quick math, well over a billion people in the last century, well over 10% of the Earth’s current population, has died because of cigarettes, most of them from directly known toxic substances and processes sold to people under false pretences.

Prohibitions don’t work, but regulations do, which are simply targeted prohibitions.

Lowering the amount of mercury and lead in the water and air of the United States has significantly lowered the amount of birth defects, chronic illnesses and cancers in the United States.

Not using a particular red dye that was found to be carcinogenic meant m&m and cake shops had to take a decade to reformulate a non-toxic red dye, but because of that regulation requiring a safer product, cancer and illness rates dropped.

Banning cigarettes is not going to stop people from smoking cigarettes, but a nationwide ban on an indisputably toxic substance is practically and politically important so that companies know the momentum that they’ve built up pushing their unnecessarily toxic products is losing steam.

Alcohol is indeed bad for you, but not on the level of cigarettes. Cigarettes are intentionally filled with additive chemicals that both cause them to be hyper addictive and substantially raise the risk of cancer. They are designed to be deadly from the ground up in the name of making a few extra bucks.

Vast sums of money have also been spent on inveigling the public into believing that cigarettes are better for you than they actually are, up to and including the purchasing of scientists to draw false conclusions in public studies in order to present cigarettes as healthy.

The sheer maliciousness of the cigarette industry is shocking and terrible, I just don’t think there’s a real comparison here.

As someone who struggles with alcohol, ban that shit as well…

There are unnecessarily large amounts of nicotine in cigarettes, making them very addictive.

Forced is a strong word, but many smokers aren’t smoking out of free will either

2nd hand?

When your product kills half your customers, that just makes it more important to keep finding new customers!

Oh that’s a bonus feature!

I don’t think it was ever implemented.

That just makes smuggling more profitable.

It’s been so disheartening to watch. There’s apparently a large percentage of the world’s population that is scared of every change for the better. Just absolutely driven by mind-numbing, counter-productive fear. And I don’t get it.

I mean, come on, these are fucking cigarettes. There’s no mystery, here, they kill people. They’re a poison product, and the monsters who sell them are selling gruesome death. But somehow, stopping a business from profiting off of these horrible, unnecessary deaths is scarier than the cancer sticks themselves? Why? Fucking why? Is it because literally all change is scary, no matter what its nature?

I’m starting to think we’re an evolutionary dead end. I don’t know how we survive past this madness.

You’ve never seen how people are destroyed by alcohol?

Dying is one thing; the suffering alcoholism can bring to everyone in the situation is heartbreaking, and it can take decades to play out before it finally kills the addict. And nobody can change anything except them. But of course, they don’t.

I’ve watched family kill themselves with hard drugs, it’s pretty quick comparatively. It’s ugly, but after they manage to ignore all help, they do themselves in fast when they get serious about it.

I hardly need your condescension about addictions there, buddy. I’ve seen it all too closely.

Alcohol/benzo withdrawal is the only kind of withdrawal that kills people, it can cause a seizure that literally kills you