Welcome to Debates in English, a podcast for intermediate and advanced English learners interested in political and societal subjects. Each episode I introduce some high level vocabulary for you to listen out for, as well as discuss the pros and cons of a controversial topic. In the description, you can find a link to a free document that contains a transcript, if you want to read along with the podcast, a list of the vocabulary mentioned and further reading material on today's topic.

Let's start with the show. Welcome to the first episode of Debates in English, and today we will be looking at the question of smoking, and if smoking should be made illegal. So, in the UK, there was a vote in Parliament yesterday if smoking should be made illegal, and it was passed. However, it is not for everyone.

I, for example, will still continue, still be able to buy cigarettes. I don't smoke, I don't buy cigarettes, but if I wanted to, I could still go to a supermarket or a shop and buy some. However, those who are born after 2009 won't be able to buy cigarettes, legally in the UK . The first argument for why smoking should be made illegal is for public health reasons.

So the health of society. And there are two key vocabulary words to listen out for in the first section. The first word is epidemic and it's quite similar to the word pandemic when we were talking about the coronavirus. An epidemic is a large number of cases of a particular disease or medical condition happening at the same time in a particular community.

The second key vocabulary is exposed and it's You can use the word exposed when talking about a person, and if someone is exposed, it means they are not protected from something. So, in the case of smoking, you could say, When people were allowed to smoke inside, like airplanes and pubs, people who didn't smoke were still exposed to cigarette smoke.

The first reason why smoking should be banned is because it is bad for people's health. You will always hear that one person who says, Oh, my grandma smoked 40 cigarettes a day and she lived until the healthy age of 90. However, I think it is no secret that smoking is bad for your health and this is what the world health organization has to say about it: "The tobacco epidemic is one of the biggest. Public health threats the world has ever faced, killing over 8 million people a year around the world. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use, while 1. 3 million are the result of non smokers being exposed to secondhand smoke."

Additionally, the National Health Service in the United Kingdom claims that smoking increases your risk of developing more than 50 serious health conditions. Also, according to the CDC, estimates show smoking increases the risk for heart disease by 2 to 4 times, a stroke by 2 to 4 times, and lung cancer by 25 times.

So, as you can see from this data, smoking is bad for your health, and governments have a job to ensure the safety of its citizens. So, for example, it bans other things that they think are dangerous for people's health. There are a long list of drugs and substances that are illegal and have been made illegal because they are dangerous for people's health.

In the UK, guns are made illegal. Why? Because they cause a threat to people's life. The same that smoking and tobacco does. So, quite a simple argument really. Smoking is bad for people's health and therefore it should be banned.

The first argument against smoking being made illegal is individual freedoms, meaning that individuals should have the choice what to do with their own bodies.

There are quite a few key vocabulary words in this section. The first one is advocate and proponent. These are different words but they have the same meaning. So if you are an advocate or a proponent of something, it means you are a person who supports a person, another person, or a plan. For example, I am a proponent of exercise. I'm also an advocate of exercise. It means that I am quite happy to publicly support the idea of doing exercise as it's good for your health.

Inherent. Inherent means that is a basic or permanent part of somebody slash something and that cannot be removed. Violence is inherent in our society. An inherent weakness in the design of the machine. So when the machine was designed, there is a weakness which is a fundamental part of the design of the machine.

Intervention. An action taken to improve or help a situation. For example, when a government might see a problem happening in society, they may intervene. They might start an intervention into that problem. So they act. Or they try to address the problem.

Regulate, to control something with rules. So for example, a lot of people don't want cigarettes to be illegal for reasons that this podcast will show. However, some people would prefer to regulate cigarettes and to regulate something means to apply rules to it. So for example, one regulation on cigarettes right now is that you have to be at least the age of 18 before you can buy them.

Informed decision, a choice that individuals make once they have all the information related to the decision topic. So when talking about this topic of cigarettes, it's important that adult individuals are making informed decisions about what they want to do and what they don't want to do. So for example, when everyone was smoking cigarettes in the 1940s and 50s, people probably didn't think cigarettes were that bad because there wasn't that much relevant information out for the public. However, today, when people are choosing to smoke or not, they are making an informed decision because most of the time, most people know that cigarettes are bad for you. So to make an informed decision is to make a decision once you have all the important information.

An intrusion, something that affects a situation or people's lives in a way that they don't want. So imagine you are hosting a garden party and there is an intrusion. That means someone interrupts your garden party with an unpleasant situation. So one intrusion could be a big dog running into your garden. The garden. Some people like dogs, some people might be scared of them, but it's still an intrusion into your garden party. Some people think that governments deciding what people can and can't do in their lives is an intrusion into their personal space and decisions.

A slippery slope, something that is difficult to stop once it has begun and can lead to serious problems. There is a similar phrase called the snowball effect. So once the snowball starts rolling down the hill, it will get bigger and bigger and bigger. The same with a slippery slope. So people say the word, the phrase slippery slope in terms of cigarettes and government and banning because they think once the government bans cigarettes and makes them illegal, it will become a slippery slope where the government will start banning burgers and everything, well, everything that could be, , classified as unhealthy.

Outlaw is a simple word and that just means to make something illegal. So, some people want to outlaw cigarettes. They want to make them illegal.

Deem is a formal word for consider. So you could say, Lionel Messi is deemed the best football player of all time.

Excessive, greater than what seems reasonable or appropriate. Last weekend I drank an excessive amount of alcohol. That means I drank too much alcohol.

Some people state that smoking should remain legal because it is the responsibility of the individual to choose if they smoke, not the government. Advocates of this perspective claim that adults have the inherent right to make their own choices, even if those choices involve engaging in activities that have known risks, such as smoking. Central to this viewpoint is the belief that government intervention should be limited when it comes to regulating personal behavior, particularly When it comes to activities that primarily impact the individual engaging in them.

Proponents of personal freedom argue that adults are capable of making informed decisions about their health and well being, and that government, in the form of smoking bans, represents an unjustified intrusion into private lives. Furthermore, opponents of banning smoking often highlight the slippery slope that could result from granting the government authority to outlaw behaviors deemed harmful.

They argue that a ban on smoking could lead to more things being banned, leading to excessive regulation and restrictions on individual choice in other areas of life.

In summary, this means that people believe that individuals should choose what they do with their bodies, especially if they don't harm other people.

So, if individuals want to smoke, they should be able to choose if they smoke or not, as long as they have the required education and information about how harmful it is. But, obviously, smoking can cause other people health problems, if you agree with this statement, then you might want to ban smoking in public places and make sure it's only done in private.

People are not allowed to smoke indoors anymore in the UK in public, so you can't smoke inside of the pub or the train, but you can still smoke outside if you're at a cafe. Or you're walking down the street, you can still smoke. I don't know how much this actually affects people's health who are in that space, but maybe if you were concerned only about individual freedoms, but you were aware of the health risks, then maybe allowing people to smoke in the privacy of their own homes and gardens is the safe option.

The second reason why smoking should be made illegal is big business profits from addiction.

The key vocabulary is undermine, to make something gradually weaker or less effective. I use the word undermine here and I say that big business or corporations that produce and sell tobacco undermine public health. So the health of society, they gradually make it weaker.

Lobby, an organized attempt by a group of people to influence politicians on a particular issue. So the people who are in, so some people who work for cigarette companies, they will lobby politicians to try and stop a ban on cigarettes. They will have meetings of them. They might even pay the money. And this is called lobbying.

Misleading. Giving the wrong idea or impression and making you believe something that is not true. So imagine you pick up a newspaper and it said that England is the hottest country in the world. That would be a misleading title because everyone knows England is not the hottest country in the world. So it's giving the reader an impression or an idea that something is true when it is not.

Funded. to provide money for something, usually something official. Imagine a scientist is doing a study on cigarettes and the study was funded by tobacco companies. Well, that means that tobacco companies are paying for the research to be done.

To break free. This just means to escape. So someone has broken free from jail. They have escaped. Jail. I use this phrase when I say break free from cigarette addiction.

The tobacco industry, which includes powerful corporations involved in the production, marketing, and sale of tobacco products, is often criticized for its profit driven practices that contribute to addiction and undermine public health efforts. Despite growing awareness of the health risks associated with smoking, the industry continues to target vulnerable populations through aggressive marketing tactics and strategic lobbying efforts. Moreover, the tobacco industry has a long history of misleading the public about the dangers of smoking.

In the past, tobacco companies funded research and marketing campaigns to downplay the health risks of smoking, even going so far as to claim that cigarettes were healthy or even beneficial. Data from recent years sheds light on the pervasive nature of addiction to smoking and the challenges individuals face in quitting.

In 2015, a massive 68 percent of American adults, adult smokers expressed a desire to quit smoking, highlighting the widespread recognition of the health hazards associated with tobacco use. Similarly, in 2018, over half of adult American smokers, approximately 55%, reported having attempted to quit smoking within the past year, indicating a significant effort to break free from addiction.

Despite these efforts, only a small percentage of smokers were successful in quitting in 2018, just 7. 5 percent of American adult smokers, representing 2. 9 million individuals successfully quit smoking within the past year.

While some argue smoking is a matter of personal choice, it appears it's not so much a choice. Due to the addictive substance of nicotine that is included in cigarettes. Nicotine as a chemical is not actually too, , problematic apart from its addictive nature. So some people might have nicotine chewing gum or lozenges that they put in their mouth or a patch that they put on their arm. So nicotine itself is not actually too harmful for the human body. However, it is , incredibly addicting. And that's why they put them in the cigarettes, because they want to make them addicting, because people will continue to buy them and the businesses make more money. So, when people argue that smoking is a choice of individuals to make, while it may have been a choice to begin with, they may have started smoking socially, over time, once they smoke more cigarettes, they become addicted to them, and a lot of them want to stop, and they can't stop. So, if this is the case, is it really a choice anymore?

The second argument against why smoking should be made illegal is prohibition challenges.

Prohibition, it means making something illegal. And when some people use the word prohibition, they are talking about the time in America where they banned alcohol. It was called prohibition.

Revolves around. To have something as the main interest or subject. So the word revolve means to spin around something. Someone could say, my relationship problems revolve around our bad communication skills.

Prohibition, stopping something being done or used especially by the law. Yes, like I said in the small intro, that prohibition is making something illegal, like cigarettes or alcohol.

Hosts of, a large number of something. There are a host of reasons why. Cigarettes are bad for your health.

Proliferation. The sudden increase in the number or amount of something. There is a proliferation of young people smoking vaporizers.

Oversight. The state of being in charge of somebody or something. There was no oversight in the meeting, therefore everyone just started talking about the weekend. So, there was no one in charge, no one was the boss of the meeting.

Bootleg or bootleggers, a person who makes or sells goods, especially alcohol, illegally. So in the prohibition era in America, people who made alcohol illegally were called bootleggers, but you can also make other things like films and be called a bootleg film.

Potency, the power that somebody, something has to affect your body or mind. So imagine you're drinking a coffee. One of them is incredibly weak and you don't feel it. However, you drink another coffee. A completely different one, and it's a very potent coffee, meaning that it's very strong.

One of the key arguments against making smoking illegal revolves around the practical challenges and potential consequences associated with prohibition.

To make this clear, I will reference the time when the United States of America prohibited alcohol between 1920 and 1933. During Prohibition, the production, sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages, which means drinks, were banned across the United States. However, the prohibition experiment ultimately failed to achieve its intended goals and instead gave rise to a host of unintended consequences.

One of the most significant challenges of prohibition was the emergence of a thriving black market for alcohol. For Despite being outlawed, demand for alcoholic beverages remained high, leading to the proliferation of illegal consumption and selling of alcohol. The argument being that even if cigarettes became illegal, there would still be a demand, and instead of that demand being met by a regulated, taxed supply, it would be from criminals and drug dealers.

Moreover, prohibition leads to the production and consumption of unregulated and often dangerous alcohol products with no oversight of quality control measures in place. Bootleggers and illegal producers made alcohol of varying potency and quality, leading to incidents of poisoning and health risks for consumers.

The same could happen with cigarettes, where even more dangerous cigarettes may be made to reduce costs that could lead to more health problems than there is currently. If you ban smoking, it's not like people will want to stop instantly. They will continue to want to smoke. And instead of going to a shop and buying cigarettes, which are taxed by the government, you will have to go to an illegal source. That could be drug dealers or other people operating and working in the black market. Instead of the money going to governments, which can fund things like schools and roads. It can, it will go to drug dealers, which we don't know where that money goes. It will contribute towards organized crime and violence is often associated with organized crime.

The third reason why smoking should be made illegal is the economic impact on society and individuals.

Some of the key vocabulary is drain, to make somebody, something weaker, poorer, or worse. By using up their strength, money, et cetera. So some people in Manchester are not happy because they think that the owners of Manchester United are draining the club's resources, that they're taking away the money in the club instead of investing it in the club.

Burden. A duty, responsibility, etc. that causes worry, difficulty or hard work. So imagine you had a student loan and you had to pay that student loan every month and it was a lot of money. That is a financial burden. A duty, a responsibility to pay that, that causes difficulty and financial loss.

Substantial. Large in amount, value or importance. I had a substantial amount of cake after my dinner. That's a large amount of cake.

Smoking costs society 17. 04 billion pounds a year in England. Smokers are more likely than non smokers to become ill while of working age, increasing the likelihood of being out of work and reducing the average wages of smokers.

Smokers are also more likely to die while they are still of working age, creating a further loss to the economy. Together, this adds up to 13. 2 billion. Smokers needs for health and social care at a younger age than non smokers also creates costs. While smoking costs the National Health Service in the UK, an additional 2. 4 billion and a further 1. 2 billion in social care costs. Smokers also lose a large part of their income to tobacco as estimated 12 billion in England each year, or approximately 2000 pounds per smoker. Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health says: "smoking is a drain on society. It's a cost to individuals in terms of their health and wealth and a cost to us all because it undermines the productivity of our economy and places additional burdens on our National Health Service and care services".

The treatment of smoking related illnesses places a substantial burden on the healthcare system, requiring resources for hospitalization, medications, surgeries and other medical interventions.

Individuals who smoke are more likely to suffer from a range of serious health conditions, including lung cancer. Heart disease, respiratory disease, and strokes, all which require expensive medical care. Furthermore, smoking imposes an additional cost on society through expenses related to environmental cleanup, fire prevention, and public health interventions.

Cigarette litter. For example, contributes to environmental pollution, requiring resources for cleanup and disposal. Smoking related fires pose risks to public safety and property.

So yes, smoking is expensive for the individual. If you're buying cigarettes every day or every other day, you're spending a lot of money each week and each month on cigarettes, but it's also expensive for society because it costs the National Health Service a lot of money if you have a socialized health care system like most of the world, and because smokers are more likely to become ill, they are more likely to die early, and this is money that could count towards economic output.

Also due to cigarettes causing being litter, being thrown on the floor, it costs money to clean up this, this litter. They can also cause fires, which needs money to put out.

The last reason why smoking shouldn't be made illegal is the negative economic impact. So that was one of the reasons why it should be made illegal is because of the economic impact. However, There is a counter argument to be made.

Some of the key vocabulary is repercussion. An indirect and usually bad result of an action or event that may happen sometime afterwards. So there are many repercussions if you smoke cigarettes every day. You will have bad results. You will probably have bad health effects in the future.

Cultivate to develop an attitude, a way of talking or behavior. . The company wanted to cultivate a positive work environment in the office.

Emergence the fact of somebody, something moving out or away from something and becoming possible to see. So there is an emergence of young people using vaporizers.

Marginalized. Of a person or group: prevented from participating fully in social, economic, and political life because of lack of access to rights, resources, and opportunities. For the longest time, women were a marginalized group in society.

Opponents of making smoking illegal argue that implementing such a prohibition would have significant economic repercussions, both for individuals and for broader society.

Firstly, Banning smoking would have implications for industries and businesses involved in the production, distribution, and sale of tobacco products. The tobacco industry is a major economic sector that supports millions of jobs worldwide. Including farmers, manufacturers, retailers, and associate and associated businesses.

Banning smoking would result in job losses and economic disruption for those individuals and industries, particularly. In regions where tobacco cultivation and production are major sources of employment and income. Moreover, the tobacco industry generates substantial tax revenue from, for governments through taxes levied on tobacco products.

These tax revenues contribute towards public money and fund essential public services including healthcare, education, infrastructure, and social welfare programs. Banning smoking would lead to a loss of tax revenue, necessitating alternative sources of funding of or cuts to public services, both of which could have adverse effects on society.

Furthermore, prohibition could give rise to a black market for tobacco products, as demand for cigarettes would persist despite their legal status. Illicit tobacco trade, which operates outside the bounds of regulation and taxation, poses significant challenges for law enforcement and public health authorities.

The emergence of a black market would undermine efforts to reduce smoking prevalence and protect public health while also fueling organized crime and criminal activities. Police officers* would have to spend a lot more time trying to stop people buying cigarettes illegally. This would stop them from investigating and trying to stop more serious crimes.

In addition to these economic considerations, opponents of making smoking illegal also highlights the potential for unintended consequences and social inequalities. Prohibition could disproportionately impact marginalized communities and low income individuals who are more likely to smoke, exacerbating the existing economic disparities and social injustices.

Overall, opponents argue that the economic costs and practical challenges associated with banning smoking outweigh any potential benefits. Instead of prohibition, they advocate for alternative approaches to reducing smoking rates and mitigating the harms of tobacco use, such as tobacco control, measures and public health campaigns.

That's the debate. If you enjoyed it and you're watching on YouTube, please let me know your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for watching or listening, and see you next week for the next debate.