Banning Cigarettes Quotes

There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties. Think about the anti-smoking campaign of recent years. The addition of a $3-per-pack “sin tax” is a strong economic incentive against buying cigarettes. The banning of cigarettes in restaurants and bars is a powerful social incentive. And when the U.S. government asserts that terrorists raise money by selling black-market cigarettes, that acts as a rather jarring moral incentive.

Smoking’s banned in my house. Cigarettes harm your body,” he said, knocking back half of the bottle of beer.

Ever since, in the U.K. they banned smoking in public places, I've never enjoyed a drinks party ever again. And the reason, I only worked out just the other day, is when you go to a drinks party and you stand up and you hold a glass of red wine and you talk endlessly to people, you don't actually want to spend all the time talking. It's really, really tiring. Sometimes you just want to stand there silently, alone with your thoughts. Sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window. Now the problem is, when you can't smoke, if you stand and stare out of the window on your own, you're an antisocial, friendless idiot. If you stand and stare out of the window on your own with a cigarette, you're a fucking philosopher.

six obvious ways to make an activity less convenient: •  Increase the amount of physical or mental energy required (leave the cell phone in another room, ban smoking inside or near a building). •  Hide any cues (put the video game controller on a high shelf). •  Delay it (read email only after 11:00 a.m.). •  Engage in an incompatible activity (to avoid snacking, do a puzzle). •  Raise the cost (one study showed that people at high risk for smoking were pleased by a rise in the cigarette tax; after London imposed a congestion charge to enter the center of the city, people’s driving habits changed, with fewer cars on the road and more use of public transportation). •  Block it altogether (give away the TV set).

If an inmate swears at a guard, fights, or hides contraband like cigarettes or candy [Sheriff Arpaio has banned coffee, cigarettes, hot lunches, girlie mags & TV], she's kicked out of the tents and sent to lockdown--a tiny cell 10x12 feet that houses 4 women, instead of the 2 it was built for. There's no tv, no phone, & no a/c. Even though most of these women have drug problems, programs like NA or AA are considered 'privileges' forbidden to those locked down. The only way to get out of lockdown is to volunteer for the chain gang--the first & only female chain gang in the United States (as of Aug 1997). Volunteers sign a paper that says they know & accept the conditions on the chain--cleaning Phoenix streets, painting the center strip of miles of highway, & burying AZ's indigent. The accusation of 'cruel & unusual punishment' is quashed by the argument that the chain gang is purely voluntary. After all, if you prefer, you can spend the whole year in lockdown.

Devils?” he said, his mind finding its train of thought as his hand found his cigarette lighter. “Devils are superstitions. Products of small minds and even smaller imaginations. There’s one word that should be banned from the dictionary— devils. Ha! Now there’s a flippant word.

Courting is always difficult when the one being courted has an elderly female relative in the house; they tend to mutter or cackle or bum cigarettes or, in the worst cases, get out the family photograph album, an act of aggression in the sex war which ought to be banned by a Geneva Convention.

Anger over Garner’s death is understandable. No one should die for selling untaxed cigarettes or even for resisting arrest, though the officers certainly did not intend to kill Garner, and a takedown may be justified when a suspect resists. Protests initially centered on the officer’s seeming use of a choke-hold, which is banned by NYPD policy. But critics of the NYPD expanded the campaign against the police to include misdemeanor enforcement itself. This is pure opportunism. There is no connection between the theory and practice of quality-of-life enforcement, on the one hand, and Garner’s death, on the other. It was Garner’s resistance to arrest that triggered the events leading to his death, however disproportionate that outcome, not the policing of illegal cigarette sales. Suspects resist arrest for all sorts of crimes. The only way to prevent the remote possibility of death following an attempted arrest, beyond eliminating the use of choke-holds (if that is indeed what caused Garner’s heart attack), is to make no arrests at all, even for felonies.

Similarly, consider the relationship between how society handles cigarettes and marijuana. Most medical professionals agree that smoking cigarettes is more damaging to one’s health overall than smoking marijuana. Despite its intensely addictive qualities, however, the consumption of tobacco has been legalized in this country, while marijuana is considered a “drug” and is banned.

The harder it is to do something, the harder it is to do it impulsively, so inconvenience helps us stick to good habits. There are six obvious ways to make an activity less convenient: Increase the amount of physical or mental energy required (leave the cell phone in another room, ban smoking inside or near a building). • Hide any cues (put the video game controller on a high shelf). • Delay it (read email only after 11:00 a.m.). • Engage in an incompatible activity (to avoid snacking, do a puzzle). • Raise the cost (one study showed that people at high risk for smoking were pleased by a rise in the cigarette tax; after London imposed a congestion charge to enter the center of the city, people’s driving habits changed, with fewer cars on the road and more use of public transportation). • Block it altogether (give away the TV set).

I am particularly fond of John Lindsay’s suggestion that political commercials be banned from television as we now ban cigarette and liquor commercials.

A broader view of platform governance uses insights borrowed from the practices of nation-states as modeled by constitutional law scholar Lawrence Lessig. In Lessig’s formulation, systems of control involve four main sets of tools: laws, norms, architecture, and markets.20 A familiar example can be used to clarify these four kinds of tools. Suppose leaders of a particular ecosystem want to reduce the harmful effects of smoking. Laws could be passed to ban cigarette sales to minors or forbid smoking in public spaces. Norms—informal codes of behavior shaped by culture—could be applied by using social pressure or advertising to stigmatize smoking and make it appear “uncool.” Architecture could be used to develop physical designs that reduce the impact of smoking—for example, air filters that clean the air, or smokeless devices that substitute for cigarettes. And market mechanisms could be used by taxing tobacco products or subsidizing “quit smoking” programs. Historically, those who want to control social behavior—including platform managers—have employed all four of these tools.

Amid all this, I read Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick, a fascinating book by Wendy Wood, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, who argues that habits change when they’re harder to practice. Addiction isn’t about rational decisions, she wrote. If it were, Americans would have quit smoking soon after 1964, when the US Surgeon General issued his first report on its risks. American nicotine addicts kept smoking, knowing they were killing themselves, because nicotine had changed their brain chemistry, and cigarettes were everywhere. We stopped smoking, Wood argues, by making it harder to do—adding “friction” to the activity. In other words, we limited access to supply. We removed cigarette vending machines, banned smoking in airports, planes, parks, beaches, bars, restaurants, and offices. By adding friction to smoking, we also removed the brain cues that prompted us to smoke: bars where booze, friends, and cigarettes went together, for example.

No state in America has taken more aggressive action to reduce the public’s exposure to chemicals, and to secondhand smoke, than California. California banned the sale of flavored tobacco, because it appeals to children, and the use of smokeless tobacco in the state’s five professional baseball stadiums. It prohibited the use of e-cigarettes in government and private workplaces, restaurants, bars, and casinos. San Francisco in late 2020 banned cigarette smoking in apartments.8 In the fall of 2020, California outlawed companies from using in cosmetics, shampoos, and other personal care products twenty-four chemicals it had deemed dangerous.9 And yet breathing secondhand smoke and being exposed to trace chemicals in your shampoo are hardly sufficient to kill. By contrast, hard drug use is both a necessary and sufficient cause to kill, as the 93,000 overdose and drug poisoning deaths of 2020 show. And yet, where the governments of San Francisco, California, and other progressive cities and states stress the remote dangers of cosmetics, pesticides, and secondhand smoke, they downplay the immediate dangers of hard drugs including fentanyl. In 2020, San Francisco even paid for two billboards promoting the safe use of heroin and fentanyl, which had been created by the Harm Reduction Coalition. The first had a picture of an older African American man smiling. The headline read, “Change it up. Injecting drugs has the highest risk of overdose, so consider snorting or smoking instead.” The second billboard’s photograph was of a racially diverse group of people at a party smiling and laughing. The headline read, “Try not to use alone. Do it with friends. Use with people and take turns.”10 When I asked Kristen Marshall of the Harm Reduction Coalition, which oversees San Francisco’s overdose prevention strategy, about the threat posed by fentanyl, she said, “People use it safely all the time. This narrative that gets it labeled as an insane poison where you touch it and die—that’s not how drugs work. It’s not cyanide. It’s not uranium. It’s just a synthetic opioid, but one that’s on an unregulated market.

I love Nick’s story because it so nicely illustrates the power and simplicity of cash commitment devices. It also highlights a somewhat contradictory feature of cash commitment devices. On the one hand, when we use them, we’re flouting the standard laws of economics, which say more freedom is better than less. But on the other hand, we’re also leaning heavily on standard economics, which recommends that you hike up the price of unwanted behavior or impose restrictions to discourage it. These are the very solutions economics prescribes, such as taxing cigarettes and alcohol or banning marijuana to reduce consumption.

For example, until the mid-1960s, airline flight attendants distributed free packets of cigarettes with after-meal coffee. In the late 1980s, U.S. airlines banned smoking from all domestic flights.

Clever people will always find a medium of exchange that works. Cigarettes long served as the medium of exchange in prisons, where cash is banned. (It doesn’t matter whether you smoke; cigarettes have value as long as enough other inmates smoke.) So what happened when smoking was banned in U.S. federal prisons? Inmates turned to another portable, durable store of value: cans of mackerel. According to the Wall Street Journal, a single can of mackerel, or “the mack,” is the standard unit of currency behind bars. (Some prisons have moved from cans to plastic pouches, because the cans can be fashioned into weapons.) In a can or pouch,

I have never heard of a driver killing people on their bicycles because he or she had one or two cigarettes to many maybe we should ban alcohol

The harder it is to do something, the harder it is to do it impulsively, so inconvenience helps us stick to good habits. There are six obvious ways to make an activity less convenient: · Increase the amount of physical or mental energy required (leave the cell phone in another room, ban smoking inside or near a building). · Hide any cues (put the video game controller on a high shelf). · Delay it (read email only after 11:00 a.m.). · Engage in an incompatible activity (to avoid snacking, do a puzzle). · Raise the cost (one study showed that people at high risk for smoking were pleased by a rise in the cigarette tax; after London imposed a congestion charge to enter the center of the city, people’s driving habits changed, with fewer cars on the road and more use of public transportation). · Block it altogether (give away the TV set).

People who have no trouble advocating that cigarette commercials be banned from the airwaves on the grounds that they encourage young people to smoke should think again about the degree to which all people, and especially young people, take the media's well-crafted, market-tested messages to heart.

have that effect on women.” His smile broadened to reveal those delicious dimples. “Panties just fall off and disappear into thin air when I’m around.” He lit up a cigarette, violating the city non-smoking ban, and took a deep drag on it, eyeing her with cool interest. To her surprise, he took one of her hands

Sit on a roof and have a cigarette and a nice long panic, just like I used to when I was seventeen.

It’s not enough that the public should be informed about the hazards of smoking; a warning has to be stamped on every package of cigarettes. Then cigarette advertising has to be restricted if not banned. The activists will never be satisfied until tobacco is outlawed, and after that it will be alcohol, then junk food, etc.