https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/27/health/us-tobacco-age-21-trnd/index.html

For those of you who don’t already know, the federal “smoking age” was raised to twenty-one years of age in the United States in December. To be able to buy any product containing tobacco (or to legally be able to use it), you need to be twenty-one years of age, which is a deviation from the prior age of eighteen. This is a change that I welcome, although I wish that cigarettes would not be sold at all due to the fact that they are a known carcinogen and contribute greatly to the incidences of lung cancer that we see, particularly in later life. As I’ve said in previous posts, if people insist on wanting to… consume, or imbibe, nicotine, there have to be safer ways to bring it into their bodies than smoking cigarettes given the comparatively astronomically high rates of lung cancer that occur as an almost direct result of years, or even decades, worth of smoking.

Humorously, given my experience with smokers, I have never thought that marijuana has been the “gateway drug”. In individuals who have been susceptible to it, I have thought that cigarettes have been. But I understand the pathophysiology behind addiction better than at least many other people out there, and I’ve seen how addictive nicotine can be and has been in at least three people that I have known in person so far.

Although this might put addicted smokers in a bind who are over the age of eighteen but under the age of twenty-one given that they will no longer legally be allowed to smoke, I see this change in law being nothing but for the best(, as do I look forward to a day when cigarettes are no longer manufactured to begin with).