Doctors vote for ban on UK cigarette sales to those born after 2000

[Chad]

If i remember correctly, UK NHS GP's recently vetoed the governments suggestion of charging people per visit - considering they already pay for it out of their 'national insurance' - which surprised me. But i doubt i'll be surprised with this outcome.

In my village and nearby, there are about 5 'e-cig' shops and in the discounted stores,pretty much anybody can get hold of them. Are they 'safer'? I doubt it.

Anyway, cigarettes are currently hidden behind a screen, you need to look in a book to see if your smokes are featured, but if you're smoking additive-free tobacco, dream on, the only place selling it - american spirit - even with decent sales, stopped stocking it. And if you look any age younger than 40, forget it. I'm 30 and am regularly asked for iD, i think it's a mixture of reminding us that we can't think of act for ourselves whilst also rousing suspicion unnecessarily.

Doctors vote for ban on UK cigarette sales to those born after 2000

British Medical Association hails vote as step towards achieving goal of a tobacco-free society by 2035, but critics call it 'illiberal'


Haroon Siddique
theguardian.com, Tuesday 24 June 2014 11.35 BST
Jump to comments (966) [there's quite the outrage]

Cigarette smoker
The proposer of the motion said it represented an opportunity to make the UK the first country to eradicate cigarettes. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

Doctors have voted overwhelmingly to push for a permanent ban on the sale of cigarettes to anyone born after 2000

The motion passed at the British Medical Association's annual representatives' meeting on Tuesday means that the doctors' union will lobby the government to introduce the ban, in the same way it successfully pushed for a ban on lighting up in public places and on smoking in cars carrying children, after votes in 2002 and 2011.

Tim Crocker-Buque, a specialist registrar in public health medicine, who proposed the motion, said it represented an opportunity to make the UK the first country to eradicate cigarettes. "Smoking is not a rational, informed choice of adulthood," he said. "Eighty per cent of smokers start as teenagers as a result of intense peer pressure.

"Smokers who start smoking at age 15 are three times as likely to die of smoking-related cancer as someone who starts in their mid-20s."

The proposal was supported by Sheila Hollins, chair of the BMA's board of science, who said it would help "break the cycle of children starting to smoke" and be a step towards achieving the association's goal of a tobacco-free society by 2035.

A number of doctors spoke against the proposal. Yohanna Takwoingi from Birmingham said the number of 11 to 15-year-olds smoking had halved in 16 years. "Seeking a headline ban is a headline-grabbing initiative that may lead to ridicule of the profession," he said. He also said that alcohol should be banned if tobacco was.

But Crocker-Buque said: "Tobacco is not the same as alcohol and prohibition will not work in the same way. The vast majority of people who use alcohol do safely."

Other opponents said a ban would demonise the working classes and lead to a black market in the trade of cigarettes that would be potentially more dangerous than their legal equivalent.

Ahead of the vote, the proposal was condemned by the smokers' group Forest and the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association, who both said that existing laws stopping children smoking should be enforced.

Simon Clark of Forest called the proposal "arbitrary, unenforceable and completely illiberal".

The motion was initially passed at the BMA's public health conference in February.
_http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/24/cigarette-ban-british-medical-association#start-of-comments

You know if there's a black market in cigs, the politicians will be first in line to sell their duty free!

 

[theos]

This article from RT covering the same topic is up on SOTT: http://www.sott.net/article/280894-British-Medical-Association-seeks-to-permanently-ban-cigarette-sales-to-everyone-born-after-the-year-2000

These anti-smoking fascists just won't quit .

 

[Chad]

Thanks Odyssey :) (just for the record, i did check so it must have been posted after, i hope!)

I got thinking yesterday after posting and it hit me that the most insidious thing is, you will need to carry identification with you; at all times. Not so much a problem for drivers - which is becoming prohibitively expensive - however young people or people who happen to look younger, or who live in an area where there is a lot of suspicion (poorer areas); they will have to carry i.d.

One of the 'wins' the UK was so proud of - from what i heard - was that 'we' didn't have to carry i.d because we had 'never had fascists on our soil' who could demand we 'prove who we are'. That's the story anyway!

You could see it as (another) sly attempt to, essentially, implement an I.D card scheme, which they already tried in 2006, under guise of allowing young people to buy alcohol and cigarettes 'hassle-free' and it was shouted down by campaigners and the general public.

_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006
"The Identity Cards Act 2006 (c 15) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It provided National Identity Cards, a personal identification document and European Union travel document, linked to a database known as the National Identity Register (NIR)."

The Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition formed after the 2010 general election announced that the ID card scheme would be scrapped.[6][7] The Identity Cards Act was repealed by the Identity Documents Act 2010 on 21 January 2011, and the cards were invalidated with no refunds to purchasers.[8]

 

[Persej]

I got thinking yesterday after posting and it hit me that the most insidious thing is, you will need to carry identification with you; at all times. Not so much a problem for drivers - which is becoming prohibitively expensive - however young people or people who happen to look younger, or who live in an area where there is a lot of suspicion (poorer areas); they will have to carry i.d.

One of the 'wins' the UK was so proud of - from what i heard - was that 'we' didn't have to carry i.d because we had 'never had fascists on our soil' who could demand we 'prove who we are'. That's the story anyway!

Yes, I heard that you are very unique in that matter. In Serbia we got new law in 2008 that says that everyone who is older than 16 years must have ID card. Before that only those who are older than 18 had to have ID card.

And the excuse was always "EU demands this"... Well, UK is in the EU. How come they don't have it?

 

[Chad]

.

I got thinking yesterday after posting and it hit me that the most insidious thing is, you will need to carry identification with you; at all times. Not so much a problem for drivers - which is becoming prohibitively expensive - however young people or people who happen to look younger, or who live in an area where there is a lot of suspicion (poorer areas); they will have to carry i.d.

One of the 'wins' the UK was so proud of - from what i heard - was that 'we' didn't have to carry i.d because we had 'never had fascists on our soil' who could demand we 'prove who we are'. That's the story anyway!

Yes, I heard that you are very unique in that matter. In Serbia we got new law in 2008 that says that everyone who is older than 16 years must have ID card. Before that only those who are older than 18 had to have ID card.

And the excuse was always "EU demands this"... Well, UK is in the EU. How come they don't have it?

Apparently, the idea you had to carry I.D began in Europe during the Fascist regimes: Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, France and the Nazi's, Germany..(that's as far as i know!).

And according to official history, England has never entertained a fascist regime!! There were fascist parties:

_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Union_of_Fascists
The British Union of Fascists was a political party in the United Kingdom formed in 1932 by Oswald Mosley. In 1936, it changed its name to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists and in 1937 to British Union which existed until 1940 when it was proscribed.

Technically, in England, if you can't prove who you are and you are suspected of a crime (which is only limited by the imagination of the officer) then you must show I.D or they can take you to the station and be detained till proven.

i had never considered I.D as an issue, which goes to show how conditioned i was. But having heard American's debate the topic, i realised it is a fundamental issue and just demonstrates the 'totalitarian tip-toe' (David Icke quote..) where incrementally they instigate their policies, often renaming/re-framing them if it previously failed.

Or as i suspect with the tobacco issue: Withhold something the public dearly wants access to (smoking/Internet/travel), tell them 'it's to protect the children' and offer the solution of something 'as simple' as I.D cards. For those old enough to remember this may be considered an issue - hence the delay - but as with myself (30 years old), i didn't see a problem with 'proving who you are'.. till i realised the history behind it.

That said, England has been doing all manner of things which would be deemed unlawful: Police searches at stations, grabbing 'immigrants', beating protestors - so again, it's leaving people alone, till they 'need' something, and this is when they strike. And to the general public it appears that the person being bothered 'probably deserved it' otherwise why would they be stopping them? As is the belief in the establishment.

And so with the smoking. As i said, it didn't work before in 2006 (funny you say Serbia I.D was 2008) but this time - with the endorsement of the BMA - with all the other things the public are being distracted by - with the 'alternative' of E-cigs - this will go through.

As an aside, the targeting of minority groups is increasing rapidly: Unemployed, immigrants, poor people - like in Detroit and withholding water from the poorest, over here they are initiating policies against those least able to defend themselves, or who the media et al, have spent the last few years demonizing. So: disabled, poor, unemployed - Smokers!

 

[Persej]

Here they are still not planning on banning them completely, but they have to raise taxes every 6 months according to EU standards, which is the equivalent of banning them for many people. But for you our prices are probably cheap. Marlboro, for example, is about 2.3 euros (1.8 pounds).

 

[Chad]

Here they are still not planning on banning them completely, but they have to raise taxes every 6 months according to EU standards, which is the equivalent of banning them for many people. But for you our prices are probably cheap. Marlboro, for example, is about 2.3 euros (1.8 pounds).

One of the main reasons smokers i know have quit was because they are now prohibitively expensive.. Average 20 pack / 25g tobacco pack is 7.50 British Pound Sterling which equals 9.34 Euro.. A basic salary is around 7/7.50GBP. So yes, it certainly is the same as banning, and they know this!

(when i visited Serbia, Greece - a few years ago - and saw the cost of cigarettes....and that you could smoke :D )

 

[Persej]

Average 20 pack / 25g tobacco pack is 7.50 British Pound Sterling which equals 9.34 Euro.

How about 4 euros for kilo? :)

Today our police seized 5 tons of tobacco worth about 20,000 euros: _http://www.rts.rs/page/stories/ci/story/134/Хроника/1754640/Заплењено+око+пет+тона+резаног+дувана.html

 

[Laura]

It is astonishingly revealing about these fascist forces that they go to such lengths to "save people" from themselves, all they while they are killing them right and left with wars, hunger, homelessness, big Pharma, GMOs, and more.

Just amazing. We DO live in bizarro world.

The intensity of the focus on tobacco just makes me more and more convinced that there is something really beneficial about it.

 

[manitoban]

It is astonishingly revealing about these fascist forces that they go to such lengths to "save people" from themselves, all they while they are killing them right and left with wars, hunger, homelessness, big Pharma, GMOs, and more.

Just amazing. We DO live in bizarro world.

The intensity of the focus on tobacco just makes me more and more convinced that there is something really beneficial about it.

Yes! The intensity and world wide nature of the anti tobacco campaign has always struck me as very suspicious. It appears to be one of the number one priorities of the PTB, given the gigantic efforts to demonize it, even to the extent of manufacturing fears of third and fourth hand smoke!

It seems to me, that this is one of the lies that seems to catch almost everyone, even people who are fully aware of the dangers of big Pharma, GMOS, fluoride, etc, are still taken in by this one. It makes me wonder too, just why are they spending so much energy into basically stamping out tobacco? With their track record, it sure looks like there must indeed be something beneficial about it.

 

[Chad]

There was that state in the US which was attempting to push through a town wide ban - which i believe failed after an outcry, and near revolt during the town meeting.

Here in the UK, a report was released in October 2014 and the following headline was in most MSM papers:

_http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/major-new-health-report-ban-smoking-in-londons-public-parks-and-squares-9794702.html

Major new health report: 'Ban smoking in London's public parks and squares', say officials

New York: in 2011 smoking was banned in parks and on beaches (Getty) [trial it in one location, implement it everywhere]

“It would be a powerful message for the iconic centre of our city and the political heart of our country to become smoke free,” he said. “What better way to show our city’s ambition to be the healthiest major global city.”

The irony that London has some of the worst air pollution in Europe is lost on them. The move seems to have gone away but you know that it was just to acclimatise people, bearing in mind that many are turning to e-cigs, and soon enough there'll be a posse of ex-smokers (as fanatic as they are) who will see this as progressive; now that they're not smoking...

So we have: extortionate pricing, products not on display, cigarettes available are all chemical laden, ID required for many purchases, designated smoking areas being devised and soon they want blank packaging.