Doctors in the U.K. have come up with a brilliant way to prevent smoking-related disease in the future: ban the sale of cigarettes to anyone born after the year 2000.

One doctor said the move could create the first tobacco-free generation.

However, without consent from the British legislature, it won’t become reality.

The doctors’ union has lobbied the government in the past — successfully, at that — for a ban on smoking in cars with children and lighting up in public places.

However, this vote is quite extreme, and could be more of a symbol to get people talking about other ways to put a dent in smoking and its related health issues and deaths than a literal appeal to the British government to institute such a ban.

The concept has been criticized as being illiberal, impractical and attention-seeking.

Sure, it could be all of those.

The idea has also been criticized by some jumping to the conclusion that a ban would push cigarettes and smoking underground, increase smuggling and become a very profitable, likely very dangerous business, as trafficking in other contraband is.

But smoking is already a dangerous activity and a wildly profitable business.

Besides the litany of well-documented health issues that smoking is a risk factor for, working conditions at tobacco farms in countries around the world can be hazardous.

In terms of profits, big tobacco is really gigantic tobacco. The U.K.-based Imperial Tobacco Group is worth somewhere in the neighbourhood of $38.4 billion. British American Tobacco is valued at about $58.1 billion. Japan Tobacco International is worth about $65.9 billion; and Philip Morris, the producer of Marlboro, Basic, Parliament and Virginia Slims cigarettes is worth about $67.7 billion.

In Winnipeg, a city councillor is pushing for a smaller-scale ban: she wants to eliminate smoking on outdoor patios.

During the city’s short patio season, the smell of cigarette smoke and adverse effects of breathing it in are deterrents for some patio patrons, the councillor reasons.

Opponents are already foreseeing the closure of restaurant patios if such a ban is instituted.

I am reminded of the episode of The Simpsons called “E-I E-I D’oh” from 1999 when Homer accidentally creates a monster called the “tomacco,” which looks like a tomato but tastes like tobacco.

In true Simpsons style, the episode is a heavy-handed satire of big tobacco, which peddles a product it knows to be destructive, and a product which is passionately defended by those who use it despite its destructive power.

Pretty soon, the animals on the tomacco farm are so hooked on the thing that they’ll do anything and everything for it — including plot an Animal Farm-style uprising.

But they’re undone by their own raging addiction after they ravage every last one of the tomacco plants.

In 2003, an Oregon man actually made a tomacco plant by grafting together a tomato plant and tobacco roots as both plants belong to the same family, which also includes eggplant and Nightshade. At the time, the man told media he is not a big fan of big tobacco after his lifetime-smoker mother died of lung cancer and his lifetime-smoker father had one lung removed and later died of colon cancer.

People don’t need legislation or bans to save them from themselves. They will always have their vices and find ways to access them, whether those vices are legal or not. Where there’s a will to access a substance, there’s a way.

The thing is, there are probably loads of young people who think they’ll just try it once, and don’t really have the will to seek out cigarettes on their own. Maybe they bum from a friend when they go out for a drink once in a while. Maybe some steal one from a parent’s pack just to see what it’s like. These people aren’t likely to be particularly driven to buy smokes for themselves when they come of age.

But when you really look at the British doctors’ proposed ban and the Winnipeg councillor’s patio smoking ban with a critical eye, you may just realize that to a lot of people, access to that vice is the sticking issue.

The British doctors’ ban might be a sensationalist solution to smoking-related health problems, but it would almost certainly put a big dent in big tobacco. And you can almost certainly bet that’s not going to happen.