New York City continues to restrict personal liberty, raises legal tobacco purchase age to 21

(http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/us/new-york-city-tobacco-age/) With bans on large soda sizes and oppressive gun control laws, New York City seems obsessed with restricting freedoms and telling its residents how they should live. And now, the New York City Council has just approved a new measure to continue the expansion of government control. On Wednesday, the council voted to approve a new anti-tobacco law that will raise the legal purchasing age of tobacco from 18 to 21.

The bill, known as "Tobacco 21," will also affect electronic cigarettes and was approved along with the "Sensible Tobacco Enforcement" bill, which, according to CNN, "will prohibit discounts on tobacco products and increase enforcement on vendors who attempt to evade taxes."

"By increasing the smoking age to 21, we will help prevent another generation from the ill health and shorter life expectancy that comes with smoking," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a statement on Wednesday.

While it is true that cigarettes represent a significant threat to public health, they much more affect the consumers who make the conscious choice to smoke them. Smoking leads to many potentially deadly health conditions, including emphysema, bronchitis, atherosclerosis, high blood pressure and several types of cancer. However, tobacco products are not the only consumer items that cause chronic, health-debilitating diseases. Children at any age are able to go and purchase an artery-clogging hamburger from McDonald's. Anyone is completely free to engorge themselves on aspartame, high fructose corn syrup and carcinogenic artificial dyes in Pepsi and Coca-Cola's sodas. Now, New York has decided that 18-year-olds are mature enough to get married, kill babies (through abortion), join the military and kill people from other countries, or die trying, drive a two-ton, speeding hunk of metal down a crowded street and vote for elected officials, but they apparently don't possess the critical thinking skills necessary to decide whether to smoke a cigarette or not.

While it is one thing to restrict smoking in public places, which might actually protect public health, it is an entirely different matter to restrict a person's freedom and tell an adult that they are no longer allowed to make their own health decisions. Especially if they were to exercise that choice privately, in a way that doesn't even affect anyone else.