Doctors to vote on cigarette sale ban for those born after 2000

Doctors are to vote on whether to push for a permanent ban on the sale of cigarettes to anyone born after the year 2000 in an attempt to protect the next generation of children from the deadly effects of smoking.


If the motion is passed at the British Medical Association's annual representatives' meeting on Tuesday, the doctors union will lobby the government to implement the policy in the same way it successfully pushed for a ban on lighting up in public places and on smoking in cars carrying children, after votes in 2002 and 2011 respectively.


Tim Crocker-Buque, a specialist registrar in public health medicine who proposed the motion, said the idea was that "the 21st-century generation don't need to suffer the hundreds of millions of deaths that the 20th-century generation did".


"Cigarette smoking is specifically a choice made by children that results in addiction in adulthood, that is extremely difficult to give up. Eighty percent of people who smoke start as teenagers. It's very rare for people to make an informed decision in adulthood. The idea of this proposal is to prevent those children who are not smoking from taking up smoking."


In 2012, 23% of pupils in England aged 11 to 15 had tried smoking at least once, according to official figures, although the proportion has been decreasing since 1996, when it was 46%. Of current smokers or those who smoked regularly at some point in their life, 66% said they started smoking before they were 18. The age at which someone can be legally sold cigarettes rose from 16 to 18 in 2007.


George Butterworth, Cancer Research UK's tobacco policy manager, said steps to tackle the 100,000 lives a year lost to smoking should continue and described the proposal as an interesting idea. "There are more than 10 million smokers in the UK, and it's just not practical to ban smoking. But we do want to encourage and support smokers to quit, and to do all we can to stop children from starting in the first place."


Similar proposals have been put forward in Singapore and in Tasmania, Australia, where, in 2012, the upper house passed a ban on selling cigarettes to anyone born after 2000 but it has not been passed by the lower house. Simon Clark, the director of the smokers' group Forest, argued that criminals would simply take over the supply of cigarettes to people who could not buy them legally.


"We already have legislation designed to stop children smoking. Enforce those laws and ban proxy purchasing," he said. "The idea that free-thinking adults could be barred from buying cigarettes because of the year in which they're born is both preposterous and discriminatory. It's arbitrary, unenforceable and completely illiberal."


A spokesman for the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association described the proposal as "a poorly thought through tobacco control measure. The BMA should reject this nonsensical measure and instead focus on measures likely to reduce young people's access to tobacco."