This is insanely dumb. Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you. So if people want to do it anyway who cares. I understand the cafe and indoor space bans but not allowing anyone to do it seems stupid. I don’t smoke but UK has really gone off the deep end recently with social controls, what is the point?
Some cities have streets where internal combustion engines are banned.
Some have bans on just diesel engines. Others ban combustion engines during some hours.
Some inner-city congestion taxes have been introduced for health reasons.
While I appreciate those efforts, and do not mind tobacco-free streets, I'll also note that some cities have unfiltered power plant exhaust falling on them, carried by the jet stream from other cities vast distances away, which care less about the problem. The local solution may not be the optimal solution.
When they came for the smokers, I did not care, because I was not a smoker.
There's a general trend of trying to "optimize" society to remove all ills, and once you apply that logic, there's no clear stopping point. Once you ban sale of tobacco products, you can use that same logic to ban anything, from Cheetos to skydiving to motorcycles.
