You will therefore never be able to buy them, even as adults, although the bill must first pass through Parliament
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced that his government is working on one of the strictest anti-cigarette laws in the world. Under the bill, which is based heavily on a similar decision made in New Zealand last December, people born after January 1, 2009 will never be allowed to purchase cigarettes or other tobacco products. The ban applies forever, even if you have reached the age of majority: To give just one example, in practice it means that in 2050 a forty-year-old will no longer be able to legally buy a pack of cigarettes. However, people born before 2009 can still do so.
To come into force, the law must first be passed by the British Parliament, in which Sunak’s Conservative Party has a majority. However, the prime minister said he would give his party’s MPs freedom of choice but urged them to make the decision as a “matter of conscience”.
Sunak presented the project with great fanfare. In an official statement published on its website, the government says it wants to “create a ‘smoke-free generation'”. According to British government calculations, smoking is the cause of death for 64,000 people every year in England alone. Sunak specifically said that the decision was also made on the idea that reducing smoking would not only reduce the number of deaths, but also reduce the costs incurred by the NHS in treating people who suffer from smoking-related physical problems such as Strokes, heart and lungs develop diseases. According to Sunak, the consequences of smoking cost the British health system 17 billion pounds (around 20 billion euros) every year.
– Also read: Are e-cigarettes harmful to you?
However, the law does not criminalize smoking: only the sale of cigarettes and other products containing tobacco to people born in 2009 or later is illegal. The government has said that people who can legally buy cigarettes today will not be banned in the future. The government is also working on a series of new measures to make e-cigarettes and other types of vaporizers less attractive to young people by limiting the number of flavors available and introducing new rules for the packaging in which they are sold.
The fact that Sunak’s proposal is still very new has not yet led to a debate on the issue developing in the UK. However, in New Zealand, where a similar law already exists, some doubts have also been expressed about the measure: an opposition party had suggested that the total ban would have encouraged a black market in tobacco products over the years and caused major problems for the shops that sell them today. However, estimating the long-term consequences of such a measure is currently very difficult: the experiments in New Zealand and the United Kingdom are among the first experiments in the world.
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