Puff the Magic Dragon

The current UK PM, not unreasonably, wants to phase out cigarette smoking, by gradually raising the age at which these 'cancer sticks' can be purchased. Michelle Mitchell (Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK) would like to go further and make the 'hugely profitable' tobacco companies pay considerable compensation for the damage their products make (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/04/tobacco-companies-smoking-profits-tobacco-levy-cancer-research). Tobacco companies shouldn't be able to legally rake in eye-watering profits from selling something they know (and have known for decades) causes ill health and death. The diseases caused by cigarettes are also hugely costly to institutions like the UK's National Health Service. Polluters are supposed to pay! One can also make a case for producers and sellers of vapes to be required to compensate. After all, cigarette smoking and vaping both rely on the addictive properties of nicotine. If nicotine was discovered today, it's likely it would be declared an illegal drug. It seems the producers of vapes have been given too much credit for weaning folk off cigarettes. We don't yet know a) if some vape-users might later switch to cigarettes and b) the long-term health impacts using vapes. There's not much point in stopping children starting to smoke cigarettes, if we simply direct them to vapes. The distinction between tobacco and vape products (and the companies making them) is distinctly arbitrary.