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The difference is:

If you ban cigarettes your population will revolt and you will lose votes.

If you ban trans-fats, only health-aficionados will think "good", and the rest of the population will think "what fats"?



> If you ban cigarettes your population will revolt and you will lose votes

I'd bet the majority of voters might be against a total ban if you ask them, but wouldn't actually mind much if it was implemented.

There's no chance the population revolts over this issue. Now a total alcohol ban on the other hand...


You have it backwards. The majority wouldn't understand but the nanosecond your banned it they'd know you made things worse for them. See for example gas can spouts.

Furthermore, if you start banning oils I can see industry just doing what the chemical industry does when you ban stuff and using a very similar compound that isn't on the naughty list and might even be worse because it's not as studied so there needs to be some way to be assured that won't happen.


The majority doesn't smoke (anymore - this would have been false 40 years ago and so different results), and so won't care.

Most people have gas cans, but didn't know that they cared about the spouts until a change was made that caused them not to work. People have better things to do than keep track of all the details that congress is doing, and I'm not sure anyone anticipated that the change would result in making gas cans unfit for the purpose of getting gas from a pump the your lawn mower. I can't blame people for being mad about it though, new gas cans either don't work or are very expensive for what is in the end just a container.


My point is that nobody cares about abstract oils but if you make everything in the junk food isle suck compared to last year they'll be pissed off, kinda like they didn't care about gas cans until the government made the spouts a pain in the ass.


I'm genuinely amazed how little resistance there was over us raising the smoking/vaping age to 21.




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