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Nations have always struggled to kick cigarettes for good. It is *** judgment of the committee that cigarette smoking contribute substantially to the overall death rate. Quitting outright requires *** complete ban, possession and sales. But so far the best we can do is *** patch. The slow and steady release of regulation, can we still buy cigarettes? Of course, where can we smoke them? Smoking causes about 480,000 deaths in the US each year. Four times as many as all drug overdoses combined, those half *** million deaths are preventable. So why not prevent them? I spoke with Ken Warner, *** man with 45 years experience in the realm of tobacco policy and harm reduction. Considering the substantial death count. Should the US ban smoking? Could we even if we wanted to? First of all, you need to recognize that no country in the world has banned cigarettes. The Kingdom of Bhutan has come close. Bhutan's 2004 prohibition on cigarettes lasted 16 years resulting mostly in *** higher prison population. Tobacco use remains steady. I think it was 16 hundreds. Sultan Mirra the fourth of what is essentially now Turkey prohibited all forms of smoking tobacco and made it punishable by death. But he personally in disguise would walk around the streets and find people smoking and he would kill them on the spot. But that didn't get people to quit smoking, which is itself pretty telling. This is *** powerful behavior. Cold turkey indeed. Yet in *** world where *** nary, *** cigarette ban has survived long term. New Zealand and Mexico say, hold my beer. We have more regulations in this country on the safety of the sale of *** sandwich than on *** cigarette. The island nation changed that. Its innovative new laws include *** rising limit that will lead to *** total ban on smokes because eventually no one alive will be allowed to buy them Mexico for its part made smoking illegal in all public spaces, indoor and outdoor. One of the strictest policies in the world. But the US has *** more complicated relationship with tobacco as an industry. There are six southeastern states that are called the tobacco states for decades. If you wanted to get anything done in the Senate, you had to make sure that you had the tobacco block states with you, which meant in turn that you couldn't do anything against the tobacco at the local level. Though 15 different states did abolish cigarette sales in the 18 nineties. According to the National Library of Medicine, those laws all disappeared from industry pressure and the lure of tax revenues. By 1921 all of them had repealed their bans. In 1964 the surgeon general released its earth shattering report, smoking and health. This stated officially that smoking causes cancer and contributes significantly to the overall death rate. *** well established tobacco industry would not go quietly, lawyers and lobbyists assemble and now we can't smoke anywhere either. No smoking, no for our health. No, not for control. Talk of smoking bans leads of course to more philosophical concerns in the free world. We fight to protect our right to privacy and personal autonomy. Even at our own peril. Can we still buy cigarettes? Of course, where can we smoke them? No way. It's largely *** self affecting behavior, not exclusively, but there are people who philosophically are opposed to bans on anything that is largely self affecting. We also have experience with prohibition laws and it didn't go well between the interests of profit privacy and the public health harm reduction becomes the most practical approach. Everybody have *** seat, have *** seat in 2009. Congress passed and President Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. This gave FDA the authority and responsibility to regulate tobacco products. However, it had *** lot of quirks in it and *** lot of people who are critical of it even call it the Marlborough Protection Act because they feel that it's been set up to protect cigarettes. The biggest quirk was that any cigarette product that was on the market as of 2007 is grandfathered and essentially cannot be removed. The FDA whose mission it is to protect the public health is forced to leave, what Ken calls the most dangerous product in human history. On the shelves, cigarette smoke contains 7000 plus chemicals. Scores of them are known to be toxic to human beings. There are 70 known human carcinogens causes of cancer that are included in cigarette smoke. It's the single most dangerous product in human history and has killed far more people than any other product even so as of 2009, prohibition of cigarettes is for all intents and purposes off the table. Even regulation at the federal level can appear futile. And if they do manage to get something to the state where they're going to announce that they're planning to, to adopt the policy or regulation, all of *** sudden there's *** flood of lawsuits from the tobacco industry. That delay is even the smallest action on tobacco regulation. For years, these graphic warning labels were intended to be placed on packs in 2012, 10 years later are still in the drawer. There are 90 to 100 countries around the world that have these kinds of labels. So we're coming to this very, very late since the 1964 surgeon general's report, smoking has been on the decline down 68% overall. But according to Warner, the emergence of vaping and e cigarettes has complicated the issue. I've been working in this field for 45 years and this is one of the most interesting periods of history with regard to nicotine and tobacco. And it's also one of the most divisive because the E cigarette issue has completely divided the tobacco control community into the mainstream of public health, which is focusing almost exclusively on the risk to kids of vaping. And on the other side, the harm reduction community who sees vaping as *** way out of smoking for *** significant subset of smokers for better or worse, fully prohibiting cigarettes is simply not in America's future. But the trends point to *** demographic shift. It's no longer the physician or the, the lawyer or the engineer. Now it's people from lower socioeconomic classes. It is minority groups, disadvantaged groups. It is people suffering from mental health problems or other addictions and we've kind of written them off. We've kind of forgotten about them, which is uh as *** public health tragedy along with every San original unbiased report. We're also working to give you *** full picture of what's going on in the world with our media miss tool, use it to see what other outlets are missing.