There was one thing that puzzled me about the editors of the Washington Post’s prescription that Congress raise the legal smoking age and enforce it:
Raising the smoking age must be one part of a comprehensive strategy that also looks at access and marketing to tackle this public-health crisis. Cigarette smoking and secondhand smoke cause more than 480,000 preventable deaths each year — more than opiate overdoses, gun violence and automobile crashes combined. Congressional action to curb underage tobacco use is long overdue.
and that was how do they plan to enforce it? Just passing a law won’t do it. There has been a law against marijuana use not just by teenagers but for everyone for as long as I can recall. Somehow nearly half of all kids have at least tried marijuana by the time they’re out of high school. The drinking age is 21 in all or nearly all states. Somehow nearly 5% of kids under 17 suffer from alcohol use disorder.
Passing laws is easy. Enforcing them is hard.
taxing tobacco into oblivion is one of the chattering class topics du jour even though they like that tobacco settlement money and tobacco tax revenue, both of which end with a ban.
Ironically, they cannot achieve their notional objective without limiting immigration. Nearly every country from which we receive significant numbers of immigrants has considerably higher prevalence of smoking than we do here, particularly among men (who are most commonly migrants). China and India are really horrible in that respect. 2/3s of Chinese men smoke. 70% of Indian men smoke.