Smoking age is specifically the ability to purchase. There are no criminal/civil charges for underage smoking. The crimes are specifically 1) selling to minors 2) buying for minors.

TL;DR: No one goes/will go to jail for underage smoking. They won’t even get in trouble for buying. The onus is on the vendor OR the legal purchaser who handed them off.

I know this is pretty radical, but if we made smoking FFA way fewer people should theoretically start smoking in the first place. From my experience when I was still at school most of the people there were only smoking because it's "cool", making smoking legal for everyone should take the coolness factor away at least.

I'd prefer they start at 60 and raise it every year, but I'll take what I can get.

Prohibition never works, the best bet is to keep it legal and make it as inconvenient as possible like: raising taxes on tobacco, make it illegal to smoke outside of dedicated zones (Quebec has done it I believe), fine people who litter their cigarette butts (hard to implement but, it might deter a large majority from doing it), keep helping smokers to quit and keep raising awareness for younger people.

This method stops current smokers from being criminalised.

If you ban it like prohibition, you will instantaneously create a black market. Continually increasing the age you can buy cigarettes is easier. Everyone that this effects will not have the option to legally create a cigarette habit/addiction.

A straight up outlawing would have the maximum effect. But it would be costly to enforce, whilst increasing overall criminal activity.

What's with the whataboutism?

Agreed. I stopped smoking by switching to vaping, slowly reducing to 0mg and then realised I hadn’t used it for a week so got rid of it all.

I believe that's the intention yes.

Yes, that's how both time and math works.

Correct, that’s the point. I’m fancy, there would be a day cutoff. Likely 1/1 of some year.

You could just as easily day "oh, ban asbestos? I guess we gotta save everybody from themselves, what a nanny state."

This is bad logic that can be applied to any safety law. As a society we observe and mitigate known harms, because we can't expect every citizen to be up to date on every possible way to harm themselves without realizing it or understanding the true scope of the damage being done.

So yes; sometimes as a society we decide to save ourselves from ourselves. There's nothing wrong with that.