A proposal to raise the legal age of smoking year by year so that eventually no one can buy tobacco and cigarettes has met with a mixed response in the UK, with critics slamming it as an attempt at “creeping prohibition.”
A government-commissioned review has said that the minimum age at which people can buy a tobacco product in England should go up by a year annually until the point where no one can buy them.
Dr. Javed Khan, who led the study into how England can become smoke-free, put the annual cost to society of smoking at around £17 billion ($21 billion) and said “making smoking obsolete in England would lift around 2.6 million adults and one million children out of poverty.”
Khan, former chief executive of children’s charity Barnardo’s, also called for a tobacco licence for retailers to limit the availability of tobacco across the country.
He said the government should ban supermarkets from selling tobacco and ban online sales for all tobacco products.
Furthermore, Khan said the government should “substantially” raise the cost of duties (more than 30 percent) across all tobacco products to make smoking more expensive and abolish duty-free cigarettes.
Smoking should also be banned outside cafes, restaurants, and pubs, and in all outdoor areas where children are present, for example, public beaches, he added.
The Royal College of Physicians backed the review’s findings, and a Downing Street spokesman said the review will be “carefully considered.”
But smokers’ lobby group Forest criticised the recommendations.
Forest director Simon Clark said: “Creeping prohibition won’t stop young adults smoking. It will simply drive the sale of tobacco underground and consumers will buy cigarettes on the black market where no one pays tax and products are completely unregulated.”
He added: “Ultimately this is about freedom of choice and personal responsibility and ministers must think very carefully before they adopt prohibition and coercion as tools to achieve their smoke-free goal.”
The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a London-based free-market think tank, also dismissed the review as the “start of incremental prohibition” of tobacco.
In an article for The New Statesman magazine, Christopher Snowdon, IEA head of lifestyle economics, described the call to raise the smoking age as “a puritanical minority going after a poor and marginalised minority.”
He said that increasing the smoking age to 21 is not comparable with other age restrictions, such as voting, drinking, and sexual relations.
