re: exploding cig loads
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Yeah, 16 year old me would have loved the hell out of these.
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Let’s just go full Star Wars and call them Death Sticks
The government are the ones addicted to cigarettes.
They could easily ban them, and get it over with, but then they’d have to give up all that lovely tax income, so they waste time on these useless gestures.
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Actually they will. The reason this action is being taken is because the scary packaging has been shown to help quite a bit. This is the next step.
It’s not a question of ignorance vs knowledge. It’s a question of constantly reminding people to make it harder to lie to themselves about it. That’s what we do with everything bad- we lie to ourselves about it.
Humans are not perfect rational actors that respond in self-interest to information. We are messy, complicated, emotional blobs that need constant nudging to do the right thing sometimes.
Studies showed the gruesome packaging (which Canada pioneered) reduced smoking 12-20% from 2000 to 2009.
We haven’t done that because the evidence shows it wouldn’t work. It’s a powerful addictive drug and we know what happens when we try to ban those. We just finally got around to unbanning all the hard stuff again because 100 years of trying to ban them failed horribly. Products with inelastic demand don’t respond to banning.
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New Zealand is trying a combination of initiatives to reduce smoking.
Scarcity, expense and rolling increasing minimum age.
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Robert Proctor’s lectures on the history of and arguments against big tobacco are really compelling… had an opportunity to attend a local lecture, but it fell through… and I still started smoking again. After smoking on and off since the age of 14. My late grandfather started at 8. Can’t remember the exact details, but you could take the number of all the cigarettes smoked in one year, put them end to end and the length of that chain would reach out to mars and back to earth three times?!
In Oz, we have that. In addition, by law the non-image parts of the box are the same putrid olive green, regardless of brand. Fonts used branding and other labelling are also prescribed.
Edit: Images are gross. Click at your own peril
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