The state government in Hawaii wants to increase the smoking age to 100.  Although pretty much everyone on Earth knows smoking is damaging to a person’s overall health, the nanny state is taking it upon themselves to ban the use of more substances.

Nothing good can ever come from the government dictating to people what they are allowed to put in their bodies, and that includes smoking.  Are we free or not? Do we own ourselves or not? Governments assume they own us as tax cattle and therefore it’s their right to tell us how to live our lives.  Unfortunately, too many bow down to the whims of the state while others enforce these nanny state policies.

If this bill succeeds in becoming a law, it would effectively ban the use of cigarettes for a very vast majority of the Hawaiian population. The bill was proposed by Democrat Richard Creagan, an obvious authoritarian. Even if it does become a law, laws hinge only on the population’s willingness to abide by them, so it could be futile much like prohibition was. Not to mention worldwide smoking rates are plummeting to people voluntarily making the decision that it isn’t good for them. According to the BBC, Creagan, who was an emergency room physician before he was elected as state representative in 2014, calls the cigarette “the deadliest artifact in human history” in the bill.

The new bill, HB 1509, demands that the smoking age go up to 30 in 2020, 40 in 2021, 50 in 2022, and 60 in 2023. The last jump will take place in 2024 when people would need to be 100 years old to buy cigarettes. “We don’t allow people free access to opioids, for instance, or any prescription drugs,” Creagan said in defense of his tyrannical bill. And even though the government has banned opioids without a prescription, there’s an opioid addiction crisis lowering the life expectancy of Americans.  Prepare for a cigarette black market in Hawaii should Creagan get his way.

All nanny state policies including taxation beg the question: who owns you?

“Because to take away a man’s freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.”  ― Madeline L’Engle