UK Smoking Ban Highlights Debate Over The Proper Function Of Government

The UK has just passed a bill that would outlaw smoking for anyone born after January 1, 2009. This ban is intended to be in effect in perpetuity: “Children aged 17 or younger will face a lifelong ban on buying cigarettes.” The explicit goal of proponents is “to create a smoke-free generation.”

Supporters of the ban, such as the King’s Fund, point to the medical and economic harms caused by smoking which would theoretically be alleviated by such a ban. In a recent statement, they argued that smoking is “the single most important entirely preventable cause of ill health, disability and death in the UK, responsible for 80,000 deaths per year. The harms extend to the state and NHS, costing an estimated £21.8 billion in lost productivity caused by ill health and the direct costs of treatment each year.”

I do not dispute the medical harms caused by tobacco smoking. Smoking is one of many activities generally legal in the US, although damaging to one’s health. I place it in the same category as eating too much junk food or consuming too much alcohol.

The British law firm Sentinel Legal has challenged the law on the grounds that it violates core personal freedoms: “We are not asking whether smoking is harmful. Everyone knows it is. We are asking a more fundamental question: does the British government have the right to permanently remove a personal choice from an entire generation of adults who have committed no offence and pose no threat to anyone but themselves? Our answer is no. And we intend to prove it in court.”

I greatly appreciated their summary of the core issue: “This is a legal challenge to defend a principle that has defined Britain for centuries: that the state does not get to decide what a free adult does with their own body.”

(Sentinel Legal also noted that the new law discriminates between adults based purely on age, which is a violation of Article 14 of the Human Rights Act 1998: “Two adults will be able to walk into the same shop, stand at the same counter, and one will be free to make a legal purchase while the other is permanently banned from doing so. Not because of what they have done, but because of when they were born.”)

The law’s supporters argue that the government must regulate individual lifestyles to limit medical costs that would otherwise be a burden on “society.” But it is important to recognize this issue arises because of the UK’s nationalized health system where taxpayers must pay for everyone else’s medical expenses.

In a fully free health system (which the US does not have), private insurers could appropriately price health risks related to voluntary life choices. Smokers would pay higher premiums to cover their added health expenses, just as skydivers typically have to pay higher life insurance premiums. The added health costs of smoking would be borne by the smokers themselves.

In contrast, in a government-funded health system where smokers do not pay appropriate increased costs, then the government will strongly tempted to restrict individual lifestyles in the name of cost control. If one accepts the principle that the government can outlaw smoking, what about other risky behaviors such as eating junk food, drinking alcohol, or engaging in extreme sports like skydiving?

The debate over the UK smoking ban thus runs deeper than a mere argument over national health costs. Instead, it highlights a more fundamental question of the proper relationship of the government to the individual. Is the proper function of government to protect individuals’ rights to live as they wish, as long as they don’t violate the rights of others? Or is it the government’s job to regulate individual lifestyle choices to achieve collectivist goals, even if this means violating personal freedoms? I fully support the former, but the UK has chosen the latter.