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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.