A hearing was held, according to the Courant, to determine whether there’s a need to raise the legal smoking age from 18 to 19. This kind of legislation continues the infantalisation of society, where laws get proposed to change personal behaviors. There’s much hypocrisy of course, commit a crime at 16 and society demands you be tried as an adult, except of course you’re not legally one. You can drive at 16, but not with friends in the car. At 18 you can join the army, but you can’t drink a beer.

All these individual laws, tweaking the legal age for some things upwards, and for others downwards is a waste of legislative time. In the keep it simple rule, pick and age where you grant all the “rights” of adulthood and leave it that. Car rental agencies think it should be 25.

The NBA wants you to be 19 and one year removed from high school before you can be drafted into the professional side of the sport. The NHL has drafted players as young as 17. The draft that no one wants to see returned, the military draft, starts at 18. At 18 you can vote, presumably for these same people that want to prevent 18 year olds from having a beer and a smoke. Skip the ectasy but load up on prozac instead, is what the law says.

I suppose all those warning labels on the packages of cigarettes that are heavily taxed is just not enough to encourage the wayward 18 year old from legally buying a package of cigarettes. Since those 18 year olds aren’t reading those warning it will only be a matter of time before someone out there gets elected to office in order to ban trans fat for those under 18.