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Banning cigarettes would only encourage smuggling

As a father of a teenage daughter, I can relate to the concerns raised in Ms Adeline Goh Yee Hua’s letter, “Smoking is bad for health: Why is it not banned?” (June 27). The idea of watching young children puffing away their lives horrifies me.

As a father of a teenage daughter, I can relate to the concerns raised in Ms Adeline Goh Yee Hua’s letter, “Smoking is bad for health: Why is it not banned?” (June 27). The idea of watching young children puffing away their lives horrifies me.

But the idea of a blanket ban on smoking is impractical. History has shown that whenever governments ban products that are bad for health, the people who benefit are the smugglers. In the 1930s, the United States imposed “Prohibition” on alcohol and the biggest winners were gangsters such as Al Capone. The same is true for prostitution, where pimps and drug dealers are the ones who benefit.

Ms Goh has rightly pointed out that despite every effort to discourage people from smoking, people continue to smoke. The dangers of tobacco smoking are well documented and are part of public knowledge. So, what can we do to further discourage smoking?

One of the solutions is to continue doing more of the same — keeping taxes on tobacco high, reducing opportunities for smokers to smoke and enforcing the ban on tobacco marketing.

We should also look at roping in the tobacco companies. They have made billions of dollars globally from selling a product that has been known to be harmful, and they should contribute to society by funding research into products that are less harmful to the body.

Such products could be taxed in the same manner as regular tobacco products, thus continuing to provide the Government with a source of revenue. We could also impose similar restrictions on their marketing.

Getting smokers to move from harmful products to less harmful ones while discouraging non-smokers from taking up the habit is far more feasible than banning cigarettes and all other tobacco products, which would only benefit criminals while depriving the government of a source of revenue.

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