SIN LIMITS

You have to be 18 in order to buy cigarettes from a supermarket in Denmark, but just 16 in order to buy alcohol. Why the difference?

(The difference was even bigger, until the Government raised the alcohol limit from 15 a couple of years ago.)

Virtually everybody knows that alcohol and cigarettes are bad for your health. And, at the same time, that they are pleasurable (though personally, I have never been a smoker). Since the latter means that they can never be eradicated, Governments address the former by regulating, licensing and taxing them. They also have special rules to protect children by banning their use under a certain age. One can agree or disagree about where that age should be, but it does seem odd that one is higher than the other. Indeed, the U.K. Government accepted that very argument when it raised the cigarette age from 16 to 18 in 2007 in order to match that for alcohol.

Most Governments seem to align the age at which you can smoke and drink with the age at which you become an adult; which seems reasonable. Looking ahead, I believe the next test will be marijuana. Having tried it myself, I would put it on a par with alcohol, and regulate it in the same way. That increasingly seems to be the view in the U.S., where a number of initiatives to legalise (or, at least, decriminalise) marijuana are on the ballot box in next month's mid-term elections. European Governments seem less likely to countenance such changes, so I don't expect any change soon. But then we don't have murderous Mexican drug gangs just over the border.

Walter Blotscher