The United Kingdom is to phase out smoking altogether, the government says, by banning young people from buying cigarettes at all with a minimum age to buy rising from 18 every year until there isn’t anyone left alive old enough to enjoy the habit.
Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced his intention to steer the UK towards becoming tobacco-free by increasing the minimum age to buy products every year from here on, so the teenagers of today will never be old enough to legally take the habit up. Sunak acknowledged restricting personal freedoms was not always an easy choice for an instinctive Conservative but — underlining the way government decisions are driven by socialised healthcare — said it was important because smokers cost taxpayers through needing more hospital care.
This is about “preventative care” to keep people out of hospitals, the Prime Minister said and told his governing party’s annual conference that: “I propose that in future, we raise the smoking age by one year every year. That means a 14-year-old today will never legally be sold a cigarette, and that they and their generation can grow up smoke-free”.
This would work, Sunak said, because the UK’s previous experience with increasing the smoking age from 16 to 18 saw a drop in the number of people starting smoking. The Prime Minister said he would also look at cracking down on ‘vapes’, the electronic tobacco alternative.
A report explaining the system as already implemented in New Zealand, which is becoming known for its draconian health interventions, stated in 2022:
The law states that tobacco can’t ever be sold to anybody born on or after January 1, 2009 – and from now on, the minimum age for buying cigarettes will keep going up and up.
In theory, somebody trying to buy a pack of cigarettes 50 years from now would need ID to show they were at least 63 years old. But health authorities hope smoking will fade away well before then. They have a stated goal of making New Zealand smoke-free by 2025.
New Zealand also took other measures in its law shakeup, including making getting hold of cigarettes more difficult for those who could legally use them. They are no longer sold in regular stores, but can only be bought at specialist tobacconists, cutting the number of locations where smokes are sold nationwide from thousands of locations to hundreds.
