Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/12/09/new-zealand-will-ban-smoking-for-entire-next-generation-and-beyond.html
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I don’t know what the trend in New Zealand is, but most young people I know who have a nicotine habit are vaping, not smoking tobacco cigarettes. The jury is still out on all the long-term health effects of vaping, but it’s clearly not great for you either. Wonder if they’ll come back to address that eventually.
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Why oh why didn’t I immigrate to NZ back when I was a young’un?
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As I said before.
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Banning cigarette sales isn’t just a public health measure but an economic and ecological one too. We aren’t doing a great job fixing the environment which means crop failure is going to be a lot more common and you’re going to need that land to produce food, medicine and other raw materials for industry. There’s no ethical way to use increasingly rarer farmland to produce tobacco which their only use outside of some native traditions is to keep people hooked to said product. Discarded cigarette butts are even worse and much more common than plastic straws too.
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As unhealthy as smoking is, history has shown that prohibitions and human nature will create black markets that imprison the undeserving and enrich the bad guys
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Like governments, you mean?
Bathtub hooch is easy to make (even easier to make in an Instant Pot), weed can grow like an weed & shrooms can be grown at home.
Most people just aren’t going to go through the same amount of effort to make nicotine just to keep nicotine in their system.
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this. tax the fuck out of tobacco but make it legal.
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I don’t smoke (never have, never will), but I don’t get banning it. Are they going to ban alcohol too? These types of vices should be legal, but heavily taxed and regulated. Making them illegal just increases criminal behavior.
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I’m no doctor but I once listened to a med school lecture that talked about costs associated with vices like smoking and drinking. Smoking kills a lot more people than alcohol but doesn’t cost as much to the medical system because the smokers typically die quicker than the alcoholics and don’t get as many complex interventions like liver transplants along the way. (At least in the past? Maybe super expensive lung cancer treatments are more common now.). And they also tend to die before collecting too much in social security payments. So just looking at the economic impact, it’s not clear that ending smoking would save a government a ton of money. (That’s obviously not a good reason to avoid taking action though)
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The Estuarium at Dauphin Island has, or at least had, this sobering statue of a sea turtle made entirely out of cigarette butts picked up on the local beach. I don’t know if it changed any smokers’ minds but at least it reminded me of the importance of picking up trash.
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Even that still creates economic issues. As much as conservatives in the states deny it, america is and has been for a long time a socialist country just based alone with how it deals with farming and agriculture (probably even more than the nordic countries have used their oil resources). When americans demand cheap food… they mean it. So in like 15 to 20 years when food gets that much more expensive in the US and with a larger population, take a wild guess who they’re going to take it out on first? The folks who have large farming fields who don’t grow food on it. Big tobacco would be the first folks to be in the crosshairs. People aren’t going to care about the point you made with some people checking out that slowly with cigarettes, they’re going to be worried about their own kids going hungry.
It wouldn’t be the first time the US government would take that much land, just look at what we have done with the national parks program.
And that’s just the reaction from within a powerhouse of agriculture like the US. Poorer areas are going to have even stronger and violent reactions to the scarcity of farmland.
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We already have the violent black market thing happening now.
The small corner shops that often sell cigarettes are often robbed, and the robbers ignore the cash register, they almost always take smokes.
I think a packet of 25 costs about $40 now, so they are worth stealing.
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Ok, I agree that farmland is much better used to grow food than poison, an I’m totally ok with tobacco farmers receiving a lot of ill-will from the public. But according to statista.com in the US tobacco takes up something like 300,000 acres out of a total of about 900,000,000 acres of farmland (0.03%), so it wouldn’t make much realistic difference in food prices.
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I predict a black market in tobacco seeds, backyard grow ops, and exciting new smuggling opportunities, but considering I’ve already lost a couple of friends to smoking-induced cancer, yay.
I did once grow tobacco once, white burley variety, and gave a few leaves to each of my friends who smoked, just on a whim. I was surprised at how fast and well it grew even in heavy clay and partial sun, and of course it was the one type of plant the rabbits didn’t eat, the insects left alone, and even the deer avoided.
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does that include drunk driving, and alcohol fueled domestic disputes?
second hand smoke is definitely a thing, but the secondary effects of alcoholism seem vast
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I suspect if you changed the legal smoking age to, say, 21 and actually made sure it was enforced, no one would take up smoking. Everyone I know who was/is a smoker started when they were teenagers (and then found it that much more difficult to quit as a result), because it was “cool.”
I’ve heard that, but I’ve also read that’s bullshit. Treatment for lung cancer isn’t cheap, and I suspect most drinkers who die of cirrhosis aren’t even on a transplant list. (I know a number of people who were drinkers who developed cirrohosis - it ended up killing them, without any attempt at treatment. A couple had also been smokers, and had undergone decades of various expensive treatments for smoking-related illnesses before that.) There’s all sorts of disabling heart and lung problems (e.g. heart disease, stroke, emphysema) caused by smoking (and cancers of the digestive system, too, that people frequently survive but are in bad shape afterwards) that you can live with for many years.
I suspect that idea started at a time when a lot of smoking-related conditions simply weren’t being treated as smoking-related.
On the other hand, not every person who drinks some quantity of alcohol is going to drive drunk or become abusive (in fact, the vast, vast majority aren’t), but all second-hand smoke is damaging (not to mention: even these days smoking causes a quarter of residential fires, resulting in close to six hundred deaths and more than a thousand injuries a year; and they’re still the leading cause of house fire deaths because people fall asleep while smoking, as cigarettes are deliberately designed to keep burning when unattended), so…
Let’s see… the average smoker apparently goes through 14 cigarettes a day, or 5,110 a year. (200 cigs in a carton, so about 26.) You need to grow and process about four large, healthy plants to get the equivalent of a carton’s worth. That’s more than a hundred plants. (With each plant requiring about four square feet growing space plus path space, so 400+ square feet.) You need the space, water and labor to pick them, then the space to hang and dry the plants, too.
So I don’t think most smokers are going to bother (or have the space to do it). It’s not like growing cannabis, where users consume a tiny amount of a plant very occasionally, it’s more like frequent beer drinkers making their own beer - but having to grow not just the hops, but all their own barley, too.
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I’m absolutely not minimizing the harms of alcohol, but the CDC estimates that alcohol causes 95,000 deaths in the US per year, including from drunk driving. (Don’t know about domestic abuse fueled by alcohol specifically but somewhere around 2500 total people are killed by their domestic partners in the US annually)
The CDC estimates that 480,000 deaths in the US are caused by smoking. So it’s not really that close.
Edit to add: There was a scene in the movie Thank You for Smoking where the tobacco lobbyist was talking the numbers over with his lunch partners who represented big alcohol and the firearms industry and they pretty much talk about the same numbers:
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yeah, i honestly wasn’t sure how the numbers worked out. it’s hard to compare harm to harm - but those differences in deaths you mention are huge
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