The world-first ban prohibits anyone born after Jan. 1, 2007, from ever buying, using or smoking tobacco.
The Maldives has become the first country in the world to impose a generational smoking ban, barring anyone born after Jan. 1, 2007, from ever smoking, purchasing or using tobacco.
“The ban applies to all forms of tobacco, and retailers are required to verify age prior to sale,” the health ministry said Saturday as the ban came into effect.
The step “makes the Maldives the first country in the world to enforce a nationwide generational tobacco ban,” it added.
Prohibition of the history tend to prohibit the sale of such substance for everyone, this one is kinda like a new-ish idea, merely prohibit people born after a certain year from ever purchasing tobacco, preventing them to even starting, or at least in theory. It however did not prevent people who already smoke from purchasing it. It’s a less severe form of prohibition, akin to prohibition from selling to people younger than 18, no-smoking zone. Smoking decline in a lot of country didn’t happened by chance, its a result from a shit tons of rule set on tobacco industry, short from blanket ban.
As for black market, you can’t create something that’s already exists.
There are quite a few Asian & Middle Eastern countries that have similar bans. A few Muslim countries have prohibition laws saying Muslims can’t buy alcohol, but it’s still legal for Christians, etc.
It’s certainly not common, but less of a new idea than you might think. My knowledge runs out there, though - I genuinely don’t know how well/poorly those kinds of laws perform even in those areas.
Imo, as someone living in a muslim country with alcohol sales ban on muslim only, there’s nothing similar to this. For one, if the law isn’t being amended later on, the sales ban will only and ever only imposed on muslim, prohibiting them from ever purchasing alcoholic drink. This has been a thing since the begining of Islam. What different from the generation ban is there’s in no point in time alcohol would be prohibited to anyone. The generation ban on tobacco sales however will adjust the age of smoking up by one year, every year, automatically without amending the law, so by the time the last person born after a certain year dies the prohibition will only then take effect for everyone. This is what i mean it’s new-ish, because it’s not a hard blanket ban like everything we used to see, but a soft ban that slowly take effect in a time span of a few decades.
As for it being effective or not, if we compared to the alcoholic drinks ban for muslim, does it stop muslim from drinking? No. But does it significantly decrease it? Yes. It also mean it’s significantly harder for muslim to be addicted to alcohol exactly because it’s harder to obtain and consume it, they can’t just walk into a store and get it, they have to get from other source.