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Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed
(www.bbc.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
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So they'll still legally be able to buy vapes when they're 18, just not cigs? Isn't vaping just as harmful?
Vaping introduces a different set of carcinogens to the user, but overall it is still less harmful than cigarettes. It doesn't mean that vaping is safe, but rather highlights just how dangerous cigarettes really are. I smoked most of my life as a child of the 90s, and it would shock people today to experience how normalized and widespread it was. You could smoke in elevators, restaurants and hospitals. Schools had smoking lounges for teachers and designated smoking areas on the grounds for students. I remember the uproar when laws started to demand smoking sections for restaurants, as if it was a god given right for every smoker to be able to smoke anywhere they wanted.
Fair enough, idk where the research is at now, but when I was in middle school our health class teachers basically told us it's the same shit and possibly even worse for you, but there weren't enough long-term studies to confirm
Then again they also told us LSD/shrooms are addictive, carcinogenic, kill brain cells, & cause brain disorders... which I now know all four of those are completely false for psychedelics but completely true for alcohol, meanwhile they were telling us the debunked "a glass of wine with dinner when you're old enough can be good for your health" 💀
Anti drug campaigns that boiled down to just straight making shit up in a bid to scare kids off it are so ridiculous. It just made kids not take any of it seriously even when it was correct and the danger is actually real.
Shrooms specifically our teacher implied were similarly harmful as meth and even fentanyl. Meanwhile shroom research from the past decade has found them one of the safest & least addictive drugs we know of, capable of growing new neural pathways rather than killing them, and potentially being one of the most effective treatments for depression & addiction that we know of
The amount of urban myths and pseudoscience about psychedelics is wild for the fact they're practically the only recreational drugs with evidence for long-term psychological benefit
Burger-Americans are so nutritionally deprived I could see the glass of wine thing being true purely on the fact that it's the only fruit product they have consumed in a month, and otherwise they would get scurvy
I think there was a correlative study many years ago that found moderate drinkers averaged slightly better heart health than non-drinkers, and the media latched onto that shit, and its become a popular narrative to downplay all the long-term risks of drinking
Turns out most of the non-drinkers in the study were only non-drinkers because of pre-existing health issues...often from past drinking 😭
Not only that, but I remember when I was a kid in the early 80s, you could find Cigarette Machines outside and easily accesible by anyone. Undoubtedly a popular option for teens who got ID checked in stores
Grocery stores had candy cigarettes in the checkout line impulse buy areas, right next to the candy bars, so kids could pester their parents for a pack. Big Tobacco hyper-normalized the fuck out of it all.
Edit: they tasted like mint-flavored chalk. Somewhere between Tums and Smarties. (Because of course my chain-smoking grandparents thought it was adorable to give fake cigs to a six year old.)
I used to be a fan of Big League Chew as well, even before I knew what chewing tobacco was
No? The NHS literally recommends vaping as a safer alternative.