It’s looking like marijuana prohibition is in decline as tobacco tends towards prohibition.
I wonder will legal weed just take the place of cigarette smoking? Or is it more likely that smoking will die out all together?
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Hm. That’s all a fair point, I think.
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I assume that chewing has less of a smell, which would be a plus. Of course the “hkkkkkpttheww” would probably get to me.
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I have accidentally dumped ashtrays and had to clean it up.
I have also tipped over chew bottles and had to clean them up.
In case you are wondering where my head is at on my comment. The latter memory makes me want to gag or cry.
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This is coming from a lifelong non-smoker raised in an anti-smoking household. And I recognize that cancer is a motherfucker that devastates entire families. But we really do have to recognize that different people use different drugs for different reasons. And just like the war on opiates has done harm to those in the chronic pain community, so we need to learn to be nuanced in our approaches.
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I think prohibition is a terrible idea very likely doomed to fail and make outlaws of tobacco smokers. And that’s coming from someone who dislikes cigarette smoke.
But it’s not my place to tell New Zealanders how to govern themselves.
I do, however, put big tobacco up there with the Sackler family in the league of corporate parasites.
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Certainly in some places, although it’s perhaps worth noting that marijuana is already and still illegal in NZ. I have no idea if there’s any movement to change that there.
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As do I. I just don’t want us to make the lives of people who use nicotine as an actual therapeutic the same kind of living hell that we’ve handed to people with severe chronic pain. It’s well past time we started considering the collateral victims of these kinds of policies.
Especially since so much of that damage ends up expressed in ways that exacerbate other societal problems.
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Just for the record - this is a proposal for a law that might be enacted, not an actual law, or an actual law passing through parliament
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There is some movement to legalize it.
They got almost 50 % in the referendum.
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This comes under the category of you don’t want me to be a dictator.
I understand the complexities and problems with complete prohibition or even partial prohibition. However if I end up as all powerful asshole in charge- I am going to seriously consider shrink wrapped plastic head covers for tobacco, vaping, cannabis or anything else that means someone want to share their inhaled product with the rest of the world.
It does have less of a smell, but accidentally catching an eyeful of an adult deliberately dribbling into a container made it harder for me to take the guy seriously for an hour or two.
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I have heard it’s often comorbid with undiagnosed depression too. It provides a dopamine hit.
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Yes, I know. My dad is dead, so…
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Sin taxes are regressive, falling more heavily upon the poorest segments of society, and in this case they openly admit they are targeting minority ethnic groups–Maoris, Pacific Islanders, etc.
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Doesn’t the sale of cigarettes already target minority ethnic groups?
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i use snuff but i don’t spit into a container. that fact has made it virtually impossible for most people to notice that i dip. i’d say about a third of the people i know who use it don’t use a spit container.
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It would be good if no one smoked, but that doesn’t mean any possible anti-smoking measure is automatically good policy. The tax angle, in particular, is increasingly suspect.
It’s like, if a government really wanted to do the maximum possible, they’d just ban smoking (and not bother with phasing it in over multiple election cycles). You can keep ratcheting up the tax, but sooner or later that becomes functionally the same thing, with the added complication that the government becomes by far the main beneficiary of legal tobacco sales and so has a political interest in not killing off that source of revenue. That’s already the case on Garbage Island, where the government takes three quarters of the price of a pack of cigarettes, and each year’s budget relies on squeezing a couple hundred extra millions from that teat. People still smoke, and there’s a thriving black market.
Things like banning smoking indoors are directly beneficial, don’t morally compromise the state, and promote the kind of social change that actually does reduce smoking. But once you’ve done all those things, there’s a limit to how much the government can achieve by fiat. So I think we owe politicians a bit more cynicism when they try to wield this as a motherhood-and-apple-pie issue. They know they can’t end smoking, and if all they really mean is squeezing a bit more tax revenue from the least fancy segment of society, no one deserves a halo for that.
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Loose tobacco (rollies is the local term) is taxed the same as cigarettes, but there was a time when there was some tax difference I think.
I checked and a packet of 25 cigarettes costs about $35 NZ which is hell of a lot of money.
There is a huge black market problem now of course, and dairies (local name for the corner store) are robbed regularly as a result.
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I agree with Mark Twain on prohibition:
Adam was but human–this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.
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