Outright bans never work with vices.
It can’t be taken 1:1. Vices being banned in the past was typically because legislators saw them as productivity drains, despite the pleasure it provided. Therefore making those bans inherently tyrannical to habitual users and certain non-users, incentivizing disobedience.
But this time, it’s being banned for a group that’s not habitually using already, meaning extraordinary reasons would require them to become habitual users in the first place. And smoking is typically not very pleasant at the start to begin with, so there’s little incentive to start. And, unlike in the past, smoking is no longer present everywhere. And of course there’s the knowledge that it will give you cancer and cut your lifespan.
There’s just not much enjoyment left, so even if 1% of those affected by the rolling ban slip through the cracks with an underground market, there isn’t the room for growth that sustains or spreads an illegal market like for eg. recreational drugs. Which is why those bans need to be enforced to perfection to have a chance to work, which they never do, and which is why they never work.
There are so many ways for people to harm themselves that we don’t need to ban because they come with severe risk to the person, so they self regulate. The only reason smoking needs that ban is because of how widespread smoking was, and so even if way less people start smoking than before, that’s still way too many people. A ban just needs to be successful at getting far less people to start, not absolutely halt every single usage, and eventually it will fade from culture on it’s own.
EDIT: Slight corrections. But kinda wild to get overly downvoted for the thing pretty much everyone else is saying in this thread, just with a little more in-depth analysis. Come out and tell me where I’m wrong, I don’t think you can.
As someone without aphantasia, I don’t always quite get it either. Reading is often a last resort medium for me, but it does have it’s place. Plain text primarily engages my narrative imagination (where is the story going) and only a little bit of visual imagination (since it’s kind of hard to convey certain things like body language in text without being very boring), while for example a video might invoke narrative, visual, and auditory imagination. Video games are even better to me, as they engage narrative, visual, auditory, and decision making imagination. It’s about stimulation to me, the more coherent the better, and books just don’t seem to stimulate enough for my imagination to kick off to where it’s enjoyable to read.