McConnell proposes raising the tobacco age to 21

[politicallefty]

18 is old enough to go die for your country overseas, too immature to buy a pack of Marlboro menthols.

Thank you. I'm glad someone said it. I'm very anti-smoking, but this violates a more fundamental principle in my view. We established decades ago that the age of adulthood in this country is 18. The smoking age should not be raised nationally or in any state. In fact, I've always been of the mindset that this country should join the rest of the industrialized developed world and lower the drinking age.

To be honest, I would actually prefer cigarettes be outlawed outright versus this ridiculous and antiquated age limit be imposed.

[darklordoftech]

Does South Dakota v. Dole allow for a federal tobacco age, or would they be unable to find something tobacco-related to deny funds for?

[emailking]

Raise the age you can join the military to 21 and maybe you'll have my ear for this.

[Inmate Trump]

This doesn't bother me.

However.

If they raise the age for tobacco usage to 21, then they must also raise the age you're allowed to join the military to 21 as well.  Either that, or keep the age at 18 for both (and alcohol as well).  You shouldn't be allowed to fight and die for your country but not allowed to go buy a pack of cigarettes.

[Badger]

A surprising position from a guy who state has significant number of tobacco farmers.

[Del Tachi]

Actually not a bad idea!

[JA]

Kansas City, MO has a law restricting the age of purchasing tobacco to 21+. I don't know how effective it has been at deterring smoking, but it seems rather ridiculous to me regardless of its effectiveness. The best we can do is promote campaigns that teach the reality of smoking's harms to youths and leave the rest to their judgment. Raising the minimum ages isn't going to prevent someone from smoking who's determined to smoke. The same applies to the minimum age of marijuana and alcohol purchase laws.

You can go to war, vote, and take out student loans, but can't have a beer or smoke a cigarette. It's stupid.

[Person Man]

Kansas City, MO has a law restricting the age of purchasing tobacco to 21+. I don't know how effective it has been at deterring smoking, but it seems rather ridiculous to me regardless of its effectiveness. The best we can do is promote campaigns that teach the reality of smoking's harms to youths and leave the rest to their judgment. Raising the minimum ages isn't going to prevent someone from smoking who's determined to smoke. The same applies to the minimum age of marijuana and alcohol purchase laws.

You can go to war, vote, and take out student loans, but can't have a beer or smoke a cigarette. It's stupid.

Pretty much. They should raise the age for being drafted or applying to be a fighter to 21, then. Maybe they should also have a public grade 13-15 for either Trade School (construction,manufacturing,natural resources, medical,technical, and business paraprofessionals) , pre-Professional(maths,chem,phys for engineering/cs, chem/ochem/basic math-phys for medical, writing and philosophy for law/therapy) or pre-Research programs(people who want phds).

If we want to start raising ages on stuff, we should treat adolescents as adolescents.

[7,052,770]

Hopefully this is a first step towards a full tobacco ban!

F**k no.

Nobody thinks that tobacco is safe or healthy, and if people want to use it in spite of knowing all the negative effects, that's on them and the Government should allow them to do so.

Wrong. Tobacco is one of the key drivers of Medicare costs. Anybody who smokes is selfishly freeloading on the government dole.

how do the millions (billions? trillions?) in taxes smokers have given to the govt and the fact that they tend to not need a lot of Medicare after they're dead at 64 factor into this math? 

Well, the average cigarette tax is $1.70/pack (according to Google), so a smoker who smokes a pack a day for 50 years pays around $30,000 in cigarette taxes. That's ... less than the cost of a single chemotherapy treatment. Not all smokers get cancer (though it is the #1 cause of most types of cancer, not just lung), but there are dozens of other common expensive diseases directly caused by it.

Granted, some smokers will pay more than that over their lives if they smoke more than a pack per day, but at the same time a lot of smokers don't smoke that many packs, or for that many years. And that tax money is going to the states, not Medicare anyway.

In a <65 population, smokers collectively only cost around 5% - 10% higher per person than nonsmokers. (cite). Almost the entire brunt of increased costs goes onto the Medicare population. Also, private insurers can charge smokers more premium to account for this, while Medicare does not.

To your final sentence, dying at 67 after a long expensive disease is almost certainly a higher expense to Medicare than staying on Medicare until 87 without ever having one. Medical costs are outrageously expensive, even when Medicare pays doctors a good bit less than private insurers do for the same services.

edit-also, aren't fatties an even worse driver for Medicare costs?  or at least very comparable?

I don't know. It's illegal for health insurance to vary rates by weight these days, so there may not even be any up-to-date studies on that. It wouldn't surprise me if it were true, but it's not really relevant to this thread.

[QAnonKelly]

https://twitter.com/clickhole/status/960568745298223104?s=21

[riceowl]

This doesn't bother me.

However.

If they raise the age for tobacco usage to 21, then they must also raise the age you're allowed to join the military to 21 as well.  Either that, or keep the age at 18 for both (and alcohol as well).  You shouldn't be allowed to fight and die for your country but not allowed to go buy a pack of cigarettes.

While I admire the intention, this would be terrible for a lot of people who have no plans to go to college after graduating and are looking to join the military for a career out of high school.

[Sestak]

Ok, now lower the weed age to 18.

[DC Al Fine]

Might this result in more underage drinking because people under 21 would no longer have an alternative?

Better drinking than smoking. As long as they don't get behind the wheel, then drunks don't bother me in any way and...just today, someone lit up a cigarette right in the middle of a large group of people that I was in (as well as a number of kids) and it was ridiculous. At the very least, tobacco consumption should be banned in public just like drinking is in most states.

Drinking is far more socially destructive than smoking, especially when it's started young.

This raises an interesting divide around individualism/communitarianism and drug use. Tobacco is way more destructive to the user, but it's relatively harmless to others once you restrict second hand smoke. Alcohol is much less harmful to individual users, especially in moderation, but, it has much worse social effects.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Smoking is a cancer to society and it affects the young and the minorities the most, whom die from cancer. Smoking isnt good for anyone, but people do it, to look cool.

[Indy Texas]

Hopefully this is a first step towards a full tobacco ban!

F**k no.

Nobody thinks that tobacco is safe or healthy, and if people want to use it in spite of knowing all the negative effects, that's on them and the Government should allow them to do so.

Wrong. Tobacco is one of the key drivers of Medicare costs. Anybody who smokes is selfishly freeloading on the government dole.

how do the millions (billions? trillions?) in taxes smokers have given to the govt and the fact that they tend to not need a lot of Medicare after they're dead at 64 factor into this math? 



edit-also, aren't fatties an even worse driver for Medicare costs?  or at least very comparable?

The problem is that thanks to Big Tobacco lobbying, Medicare Part D provides very little coverage for tobacco cessation aids. Basically it only covers Chantix, which is a pretty extreme solution that many doctors are reluctant to provide (it's a drug that works by cutting off the brain's access to the receptors that call for nicotine when addictive, essentially temporary brain damage.)

Fiscally this makes zero sense. It's far cheaper to pay for someone's Nicorette than it is to pay for their lung cancer treatment. Hell my current employer offers tobacco cessation programs to all employees for absolutely free, because the amount it saves on health insurance premiums far outweighs the cost.

What other tobacco cessation aids are there? Nicotine patches and nicotine gum. You can buy those over-the-counter.

I suppose you could theoretically see a counselor for cognitive-behavioral therapy to stop smoking, but that certainly wouldn't be a Medicare Part D issue.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I think the age to buy tobacco, buy a gun, play lotto and gamble, engage in sex work(pornography/nude stripping) should all be raised to 21.

You do realize the inevitable end result of that would be raising the voting age as well right?

 No, voting has nothing to do with any of those other things which are almost all exploitive.

Yes it does. If someone is deemed by the state as too immature to drink or buy tobacco or a gun or gamble, why should they be able to vote? They're too immature and incapable of making their own decisions.

You and McConnell are dead wrong - the age for all of these things should be 18, not 21. You're either an adult capable of making your own decisions or not. But if the government persists in treating 18-year-olds as children for vices, there's no reason they shouldn't be treated the same way for virtues.

Yes, alcohol and marijuana are fun drugs with social benefits that should be able to be enjoyed by all adults, including 18 to 20-year olds. But tobacco is just nasty and is is only used to feed addiction thanks to Big Tobacco marketing.

Ideally the drinking and marijuana age would be 18 and tobacco banned. But since that's not likely raising the tobacco age is better than the status quo. I remember being pissed by the tobacco age when I was under 21 because I found it insulting I could legally buy a drug I had no interest in but not the one I wanted to. At least this would be less unfair.

[lfromnj]

Hopefully this is a first step towards a full tobacco ban!

F**k no.

Nobody thinks that tobacco is safe or healthy, and if people want to use it in spite of knowing all the negative effects, that's on them and the Government should allow them to do so.

Wrong. Tobacco is one of the key drivers of Medicare costs. Anybody who smokes is selfishly freeloading on the government dole.

This is why single payer is bad. It leaves the mentality that the government owns your body. Also people who smoke die earlier so they actually waste less medicare money.

[ProudModerate2]

This doesn't bother me.

However.

If they raise the age for tobacco usage to 21, then they must also raise the age you're allowed to join the military to 21 as well.  Either that, or keep the age at 18 for both (and alcohol as well).  You shouldn't be allowed to fight and die for your country but not allowed to go buy a pack of cigarettes.

While I admire the intention, this would be terrible for a lot of people who have no plans to go to college after graduating and are looking to join the military for a career out of high school.

I was thinking the exact same thing.

[7,052,770]

Hopefully this is a first step towards a full tobacco ban!

F**k no.

Nobody thinks that tobacco is safe or healthy, and if people want to use it in spite of knowing all the negative effects, that's on them and the Government should allow them to do so.

Wrong. Tobacco is one of the key drivers of Medicare costs. Anybody who smokes is selfishly freeloading on the government dole.

This is why single payer is bad. It leaves the mentality that the government owns your body. Also people who smoke die earlier so they actually waste less medicare money.

Sorry, but that just isn't true. Medicare costs are driven by high dollar claims, not by the number of years on the system.

[darklordoftech]

Hopefully this is a first step towards a full tobacco ban!

F**k no.

Nobody thinks that tobacco is safe or healthy, and if people want to use it in spite of knowing all the negative effects, that's on them and the Government should allow them to do so.

Wrong. Tobacco is one of the key drivers of Medicare costs. Anybody who smokes is selfishly freeloading on the government dole.

This is why single payer is bad. It leaves the mentality that the government owns your body. Also people who smoke die earlier so they actually waste less medicare money.

Without single-payer, they'll claim that the insurance companies should own your body. You can't appease people who think that others are a burden on them.

[Ye We Can]

Lol at all the people in this thread who think raising the age is gonna stop 18-21 people from smoking.  This will just raise the demand and I guarantee won't make it harder for those who actually want to

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Lol at all the people in this thread who think raising the age is gonna stop 18-21 people from smoking.  This will just raise the demand and I guarantee won't make it harder for those who actually want to

Well it probably will cut the numbers. Previous raises in the age of purchase have resulted in cuts in young people taking up the practice, especially in the sense of taking cigarettes out of the "school economy" (i.e. reducing the number of people still in high school able to purchase and pass on cigarettes). You're reiterating the weakest argument against prohibition style policies - it could never work because some people really want to do X anyway. These people are of little interest to the neo-prohibitionist, who is more interested in curtailing the casual users and culture (this is why prohibition in all its forms have been so dangerous in history: its proponents basically get what they want (reduction in X vice), to hell with all of the side-effects). The stronger argument here is more philosophical: I don't honestly care if it cuts the smoking rate by x%, restricting the rights of legal adults of a certain age is not appropriate.

[darklordoftech]

Lol at all the people in this thread who think raising the age is gonna stop 18-21 people from smoking.  This will just raise the demand and I guarantee won't make it harder for those who actually want to

Well it probably will cut the numbers. Previous raises in the age of purchase have resulted in cuts in young people taking up the practice

What previous raises are you referring to?

[Mopsus]

People in this thread seem to be assuming that cigarettes are the only kind of tobacco product. I think it's worth asking whether cigarettes should be treated the same as cigars and pipes (which are only negligibly more likely to cause cancer than not smoking), smokeless tobacco (which can cause gum disease and mouth cancer in users, but produces no second-hand effects), or hookah (which has the same social dimensions as alcohol and marijuana).

If you hate cigarettes so much, it seems the more logical route would be to go after cigarette manufacturers for the dozens of harmful additives they put in their products, rather than trying to ban a plant. 

[The Mikado]

OK, possibly dumb question, but I thought tobacco ages were determined by the states. Is McConnell trying to do what the federal government did in the 80s to compel the states to raise the drinking age to 21? (Raise the drinking age or lose your highway funds)