The UK generational tobacco ban is the kind of policy that looks doomed on paper: a law that quietly makes it illegal to ever sell cigarettes to anyone born after a certain year. Enforcement will be patchy. Black markets exist. And yet the writer of a recent MIT Technology Review piece says he supports it anyway, and his reason is more interesting than the law itself.
His evidence is his own two daughters. They learn AI at school, do internet homework every week, and are already repulsed by the idea of smoking. The ban isn't creating that attitude. It's ratifying a shift that already happened in their heads.
The stated worry about the ban is enforcement. A shopkeeper checking whether a 30-year-old was born before or after a cutoff date is not a system that scales cleanly. Critics are right that the mechanism is clumsy.
But that framing misses the point. A rule you can barely enforce can still work if the behaviour it targets is already becoming socially dead.
Key takeaway: Enforcement stops the people who still want to do the thing. Norms stop them from wanting to in the first place. The second one is far cheaper and far more durable.
