Banning cigarette in Hong Kong
Recently Russia’s health ministry has released a new policy to ban selling cigarettes to people born in 2014 or later. The main reason Russia proposed this policy is because around 40% population are smokers (BBC, 2017). As for Hong Kong, 10% of the population smoke (Department of Health, 2016), this number may not be as much as Russia but to make Hong Kong a non-smoking city, banning cigarette is a major process and therefore cigarette should be banned in Hong Kong as well. Some people may argue that this policy is still a very new idea in the world and might be too risky to be introduced to Hong Kong. However, banning cigarette in Hong Kong can avoid the harms of cigarettes caused by active and passive smoking, and prevent young people to become smokers.
Smoking may sound like describing peoples’ action of taking tobacco but it is mainly divided into active smoking and passive smoking. Active smoking refers
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According to Hong Kong Council on Smoking and Health (2016) there are 0.2% of primary school students and 2.7% of secondary school students who smoke. This show that there are alarming numbers of smokers among young people and this problem should not be ignored as these young smokers have the influence among teenagers leading to an increase in the number of young smokers. The ban of selling cigarettes can reduce the number of young smokers even more which leads to a small or even zero smoking population in the future. In recent decade, Hong Kong has face a serious problem in population aging, this problem will worsen if the next generation has a large population are smokers or die from smoking. Fewer people have to provide for a large amount of old people. It would bring a large impact to Hong Kong’s society. Thus banning cigarette in Hong Kong can protect the young from the harm of cigarettes and prevent them to handle the issues of population