I think it was the prime minister (or spokesperson) who made this very clever argument: (paraphrasing) “we are not taking away choice… cigarettes are designed to inherently take away your choice by trapping you in an addiction.”
I’m not picking sides here, just pointing out a great piece of rhetoric to spin the policy as taking away something that takes away your choice. Effectively putting forward the idea that you don’t have choice to begin with.
(sorry to say this rhetoric was not mentioned in the linked article; I just heard it on BBC World Service)
The rhetoric seems clever, but it is based on very shaky logic. Smoking is a choice, I made it for years and eventually made the choice to stop. Banning the sale of tobacco also doesn’t prevent smoking - it just prevents the government from taxing smoking. Just like weed, just like other drugs. We already have problems with unregulated vapes being sold to kids, surely this is only going to make that problem worse by driving even tobacco vape liquid sales underground?