Should cigarettes be made illegal?

The important part of personal finance is the personal bit, it is for the
individual to decide how to spend their income, post tax, not the state, so that's somewhat of a moot point. As for drugs and sex slave making loads, that is for the individuals, not the exchequer, and I think that it doesn't go on the GDP figure either, although I may be wrong on that part.

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Holy sh*t. The rest of the world is progressively deregulating and decriminalising "potentially harmful substances" in the name of libertarian values and to allow people to get the help they want without the police looking over their shoulder. Only the UK would be so backward as to go entirely in the other direction.

I would agree on the personal bit, although cigarettes are so expensive in the UK therefore the benefits from making smoking illegal would be huge in terms of health and personal finance. I presumed drugs and prostitution contributed to GDP because both industries are in the billions moneywise.

Other drugs do not directly harm anyone but the user. Tobacco does. A libertarian may well be in favour of the decriminalisation of other substances on the grounds that the user should be free to harm themselves if that's what they desire, but the regulation of tobacco is a completely different argument.

(I suppose you could argue that there's such a thing as second-hand cannabis smoke, but for now that's irrelevant. Nobody publicly smokes cannabis when there are lots of non-users around).

As I said, I'm not too sure as to whether the black markets get included, not least due to difficulty in estimating value. Also, remember that gdp is in the trillions.

If we want to go personal finance, then should we not also ban alcohol, fine foods, sports and luxury cars, holidays abroad, most things that the department of Culture, Media and Sports are responsible for, etc?

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I suppose the argument there is that smoking doesn't just affect the smoker but those around them, alcohol is kind of the same but the others you mentioned not so much. It's a tricky one though because the measures in place already impose strict regulations on smoking, banning it altogether won't perhaps see as big an improvement.

I voted to ban cigarettes the main reasons are second hand smoke which should be classed as assault(smokers harm the health of those around them, which is not fair on non-smokers).This something most smokers seem to completely forget about and most them smoke very close to people.There is also the environmental problems of smoking with smoke contaminating the atmosphere.Tobacco workers are also susceptible to GTS.

http://smoking.ygoy.com/smoking-and-the-environment/
http://www.ash.org.uk/files/documents/ASH_127.pdf

so we should also ban cars, trains, planes, all electrical appliances, anything that requires power to produce, planes, boats. Actually, let's be really facetious, ban life.

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no fun, not ever

Most others may not have a direct hit on others, but one could argue that indirect is just as bad. Definitely in terms of years lost, I'm fairly sure that alcohol is way more damaging for bystanders than drinkers, or at the very least harming others.

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Nah, let smokers increase the risk of getting cancer.

Cigs act as a natural cleanser of the gene pool.

Nomsayian.

It's the exact same logic that was being applied in the quoted post.

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