Posted on 06/08/2016 5:38:23 PM PDT by Red in Blue PA
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Andrew Rodriguez was 15 years old when he smoked his first cigarette. He knows how addictive smoking can be and hopes a new California law raising the smoking age will discourage young people from taking up the habit.
"I think it's better," said the 21-year-old chef-in-training from Los Angeles. "I just hope they don't raise the drinking age."
Beginning Thursday, smokers have to be at least 21 to buy tobacco products in California. The nation's most populous state joins Hawaii and more than 100 municipalities in raising the legal smoking age from 18 to 21. Anyone who sells or gives tobacco to people under 21 could be found guilty of a misdemeanor crime.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
OK to have an abortion and smoke pot though.
Why not raise the age to 62? That would make the cancer or emphysema deaths from smoking go way down. Young people wouldn’t even want to smoke if it was just something old people did.
Government power is arbitrary. They give. They take. Alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, whatever. The rules are whatever they say they are, and the rules are constantly changing.
They just want to show you that everything is under control. Perhaps they mean that to be comforting. But it really means you’re a slave.
21 to drink.
21 to smoke.
21 to purchase a gun.
21 to vote (prior to the Twenty-sixth Amendment).
I hate how our government seems to try to keep people in diapers for as long as they can, unless it involves fighting and dying to protect said government, then 17/18 is A-Okay.
There’s an exemption for active duty military. Not sure about reserves.
Yeah OK Tobacco evil. Does anyone say it is a health product?!
Or drink. Kids eighteen can go be killed for their country but can’t have a beer doing it.
Liberals: Second hand smoke...not YOU smoking. Bad.
Smoking pot...YOU smoking. Good.
I oppose voting for 18 year olds and frankly legal adulthood should go back to 21.
Yup. I think a lot of people miss the fact that obesity skyrocketed right at the time that people started cutting back on smoking. Definite correlation.
It’s always something. People die. The thing to avoid is do-gooder government constantly doing us a favor by controlling our lives so that we’re “better off”.
Obesity is much more unhealthy.
They just want to show you that everything is under control. Perhaps they mean that to be comforting. But it really means you’re a slave.
Very well said. That's why I have such disdain for the whole concept of Contraband Law and Prohibition.
Self righteous nanny state zealots blindly support Tyrannical policies, never pausing to realize that arbitrary law can just as easily be turned against them by a different group of demagogues.
In such cases, these "victims" have no basis for complaining, since their "oppressors" are merely employing the very same faulty logic which the "victims" had used in an attempt to justify their pet Tyranny.
People sure are quick to start squealing when their own Liberty is at stake due to arbitrary law, but when it's the other guy, not so much.
True Freedom, with all of its opportunities, benefits, detriments, and challenges, is very simple to understand. but it does require individuals to eschew illegitimate authority, come to grips with their own tendency to use the state in an un-American fashion to bully those with whom they disagree.
Arbitrary law thus must be rejected in American culture, because failing to do so necessarily opens the door to virtually unlimited infringement of Natural Rights at the hands of the ever-expanding Nanny State.
And if that means that nanny-state authoritarians across the political spectrum have to let go of their pet Tyrannies over their countrymen, then so be it.
Arbitrary Law is anathema to Liberty, and there are far too many American "conservatives", "liberals", and "centrists" who are perfectly willing to embrace such Tyranny as long as it conforms to their own biases. NO THANKS.
Vote Trump!
You can die fighting but you cost the gov. if you live.
Obesity is a threat not only to an individual’s health but is also a bad influence on the ecology of the planet.
Then they came for the overweight, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not...
Make everything ‘Adult’ at 26 years old:
Obamacare
Military service
Alcohol-Tobacco-Pot
Abortion -I guess, without parental consent...
Legal Transactions
...and most importantly - Voting
What parent wants to be responsible for their kids legal transactions IP to the age of 26?
Breast implants and penile removals will be government funded but, don’t smoke tobacco. Crack and weed is still OK.
Exactly.
So pick an age, is it 18, 21, 26?
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