Cigarettes: Should they be banned?

[.:neuko:.]

You'd need a cop everywhere.

That's not necessarily what I had in mind. A smoking-related offense is unlikely to be as serious as that of robbery or murder; in the former, one needn't get arrested the moment they offend; not to mention, there are no shortage of cameras in public spaces these days as far as monitoring is concerned anyway. Likewise, you don't need a cop at every junction on a motorway to arrest speeding drivers on the fly.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that law-enforced civility would work; however, until it is tested properly who is to say that it wouldn't? The problem with cigarettes (and I mean of the manufactured kind) runs deeper than a lack of civility anyway; in fact, more likely fundemental issues with the western world. My personal concern has more to do with why people smoke than whether they smoke or not. The same goes for alcohol and most other legalised drugs. Like I said, a ban on cigarettes would serve only to divide people, but inventing half-baked laws that simply favours one group of people over another is but a backwards way of thinking, and quite frankly, a real waste of taxpayers' money.