OPINION
What if you wanted to quit smoking after all these years, and now it was as easy as logging into the DPS website and putting a “Voluntary No Sale” on your driver’s license, and now nobody will sell you cigarettes or tobacco.
Would that be helpful?
With new leadership waiting at the threshold of every office in the Lone Star State, I would like to make a modest proposal to help speed things along, vis-a-vis, managing all those things legal only for adults.
This idea first came to me after 1995, which was the year I turned 21.
I got a new driver’s license to mark the occasion, and it included a new feature: it had a magnetic strip on the back, which I didn’t love at the time.
But, a year or so later, I started to think about it differently.
I knew a lot of people, including several close relatives, who needed to quit drinking and smoking cigarettes.
“How much easier would it be for people to quit doing the things that cause them grief, if nobody would sell them tobacco or alcohol?”
I could think of several people who, in a sober or reflective moment, would see the benefit of (at that time) going down to the DPS and submitting a voluntary no-sale form that would actually prevent anyone from selling them anything like that, and the system would work as long as everyone had to have their license scanned to buy those items.
Now we have marijuana and gambling added into in the equation, and I think this idea needs to be developed into a policy that also allows families some ability to exercise control if they have a loved one who is hurting the family with any of their adult behavior.
It’s easy enough to make this happen, and the liquor and weed stores and gambling entities can pay for the infrastructure to handle everything.
We just make it across the board. Nothing gets sold without a corresponding license scan, including lottery tickets. Anything addictive you must be 18-or-older to buy.
Needless to say, this would also aid law enforcement in a wide variety of ways. Get a DWI; no alcohol for you.
Think of all the people this could help, and it would make regulating marijuana a snap, since they’re already doing it this way in every state where it’s legal.
But Texas could be the first to advance a more fully enlightened adult policy to help people and their families with these adult problems, and we should make that happen.
Have any ideas you’d like to share?
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