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Illegal cigarettes more harm than good

Posted on Mar 01, 2010 in Opinion

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 The authorities are cracking down on drug use, but cigarettes are still legal. Nicotine is as much a drug as opiates are. Countless people die from cigarette-related diseases each year. Why are cigarettes not illegal?

 

A legal drug has been banned before, and the consequences were not that good; alcohol prohibition obviously did not work. People found ways to drink the banned beverages, and the prohibition laws were lifted. A cigarette ban would end up the same way. People would find a way to get cigarettes.

What would happen if cigarettes were illegal? They would just be treated as any illegal drug is treated now. There would be drug dealers selling tobacco as if it were marijuana.

Since cigarette smoking is a fairly popular – and highly addictive – habit, the illegal tobacco trade during a cigarette ban would be massive. Jails would be overflowing with people in the pen for drug-related crimes. America already has a problem with overcrowded jails and prisons. Making cigarettes illegal would just worsen that problem.

Then there is the economic side of the situation. The American economy is still suffering, but if there are two things that people are still willing to spend money on, they’re alcohol and cigarettes. These things are vices. If cigarettes were illegal, yes, people would still buy them. But that money would go to dealers, not back into the economy like it is now.

Would cigarette-related death rates decrease? It’s hard to say. If people could still get cigarettes from drug dealers, there is a chance that cigarette-related death rates would stay the same. However, some people would be unwilling to resort to a drug dealer for cigarettes.

That said, would those people be enough to change cigarette-related deaths? According to cancer.org, you can attribute one out of every five deaths to smoking. So maybe something needs to be done about cigarettes. They are bad news.

The solution does not lie in a ban on cigarettes. Even if you shut down all the cigarette factories in the world, people could still grow tobacco and sell it on the black market. The solution lies in what is put into cigarettes.

The cigarettes people buy these days are not just pure tobacco. They’re full of harmful things like ammonia, formaldehyde, arsenic, and carbon monoxide (and hundreds of others). Do these things benefit the cigarettes at all? They just seem like bad news. The cigarette recipe needs to change. That would lower the death rate. It would not eliminate cigarette-related death, though. Smoking anything is harmful.

The bottom line is this: although cigarettes are good for the economy, they are horrible for health. It is unfortunate that they are such a staple in contemporary culture and affect society in such a profound way.
 

Email: hwebber@uab.edu