Smoking By Chia Kee Seng Summary

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In the article “Smoking is an archaic habit with no place in modern society”, Chia Kee Seng aims to show his readers that to further reduce the number of smokers in Singapore, the Government should follow through with the bid of increasing the minimum legal age (MLA) for smoking from eighteen to twenty-one years old. Firstly, Chia is concerned about the amount smokers in Singapore stagnating for the past ten years because there had always been a steady decline before this. He proves this by displaying statistics of the number of smokers in Singapore, and concludes that the decrease in smokers has led to a decline in citizens being diagnosed with lung cancer. Secondly, Chia introduces steps the Government has taken to aid with bringing down the number of smokers in Singapore, such as forbidding all forms of advertisement on tobacco, disallowing smoking in certain public areas, and increasing the tax on cigarettes. Thirdly, Chia emphasizes that to decrease the number of smokers in Singapore, the Government has …show more content…

Chia claims that raising the MLA for smoking will make it more difficult for teenagers to get ahold of tobacco products, be it from shops or from their peers. This argument is not accurate because doing so might lead to the opposite happening due to reverse psychology. Instead, such a law may evoke an increase in youths wanting to start smoking. In 2001, Portugal decriminalized drug usage and has since then faced a fall in drug abuse cases by seventy-five percent (Frayer, 2017). This proves that reverse psychology is existent within a country and its laws. Increasing the MLA and deliberately making it harder for youths to get ahold of cigarettes might make them want to start even more because with the increase, they will see smoking as something the Government is very against and might all the more want to try

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