Tobacco is a legal product that is heavily addictive.
Working people, especially Maori and Pacifica, are leading lives that are more likely to lead to tobacco use in the search for relief from the daily stress to survive and live our lives.
Tobacco is very unhealthy and leads to premature death for two out of three users. But the government allows its legal sale everywhere. The dealers in death, the tobacco companies, are permitted to make billions from their products.
The government also collects around $1.8 billion a year from its taxes from 600,000 addicts.
So we have a legal product, that the pro-tax advocates insist must pay a fine of around $60 a week or $3000 a year for their “filthy” habit. I can see the middle-class do-gooders sneer as they support higher and higher taxes on the poor and brown and obviously stupid people who continue to smoke.
It doesn’t matter that they smoke because the giant tobacco companies have been allowed to peddle their death-dealing drugs with complete freedom forever.
Of course, high taxes reduce consumption to a degree. As a former user, it was one of the reasons I gave up. But so what.
They have increasingly become less and less effective. Their continuing rise for less and less impact is just vindictiveness. At the bottom of the pile of victims are the one-third of Maori women who continue to smoke at whatever price.
And the middle-class anti-smoking warriors extend their hostility to vaping and other ways of accessing the drug of choice without the worst of the side-effects associated with smoking.
We are soon going to have a more sensible approach to the use of illegal drugs that deems their drug use a health matter but not a criminal matter. That is a good thing.
But it means that the user of illegal drugs will be able to access their drug tax-free while the tobacco addict will not.
Does anyone else see that that is absurd?
My suggestion is that all tobacco addicts be able to register as an addict and get access to a weekly supply of loose leaf tobacco to smoke at a modest price. This would only be able to be bought at a limited n number of R18 dispensaries.
We should ban all other tobacco products other than vaping.
The addict could get their fix at little cost and therefore there would not be able to develop an illegal market for the tobacco companies.
The drug user, that is the tobacco addict, could be treated with dignity and respect and not as a cash cow for the government.
There are of course health costs, associated with alcohol and tobacco, for which the government picks up the tab.
Much the same thing where the middle class put in place minimum pricing for alcohol – an impost on the poorer imbibers, buit would have no impacton the price of their own alcohol preferences.
The idea being to use cost to control levels of drinking by the poor, without any impact on themselves. Then if the poor complain they cannot pay their bills they are told to stop smoking and drinking, as if their poverty was a moral/behavioural problem.
And of course there is the dramatic rise in attacks on Dairies to get guess what- Cigarettes. From cigarette addicts. Who then get incarcerated when they get caught. Add them to the Dairy owners who are injured. And all for What!!!
Middle class city dwelling bed wetters want everyone’s lives to be as miserable and devoid of pleasure as theirs.
Classic example Thomas Morgan who is offended by the word gun, demanding it removed from his sight: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/112378613/nzta-to-replace-gun-number-plates-for-free
How come at the moment we get the worst of a nanny state and police state?
It’s the woke pc behaviour you get when your democracy is captured by bureaucrats.
Keepcalmcarry on, did you have to show that link ? I looked at it.
Worked with this Thomas Morgan about 15 years ago.I’d regard him as reasonably harmless and not Albert Einstein.
Thomas had done a degree in Pol Sc = politician, and every now and then he stands as an independent for election to the Wellington City Council but he never makes it.
This could be his new platform… but if Thomas just stopped looking at number plates, then they wouldn’t upset him.
Many number plates feature phallic symbols too, so maybe best do away with number plates altogether – or do away with vehicles which carry them, get everyone on to bikes, horses and go carts.I can’t suggest buses, because the Wellington City Council which hates its ratepayers has hidden nearly all the buses.
Maybe Thomas could find them.
“all tobacco addicts be able to register as an addict and get access to a weekly supply of loose leaf tobacco to smoke at a modest price.”
Wouldn’t it be equally ‘racist’ to allow working class people in poverty to legally be allowed to self harm via smoking and everyone around them via 2nd hand smoke, one of the leading causes of death in the 20th century (and probably 21c in the third world that are taking up smoking)?
Perhaps the taxes of harmful products should be higher to the corporations producing and profiting from it, and they be responsible under law for the treatment of smoking related deaths instead?
Likewise in the US, the gun lobby have been able to legally get out of being responsible for being sued for all the gun deaths and mass murders in a country that sues for the smallest thing. Blowing people away with automatic weapons and selling and promoting them to kids though is fine, apparently under law!
Something wrong with how large harmful product companies seem to have a free pass on the law and different laws for them, where they seem not accountable for their harmful products and the effects of those harmful products on society, unlike other’s who use them?
“So we have a legal product, that the pro-tax advocates insist must pay a fine of around $60 a week or $3000 a year for their “filthy” habit.”
So what, we’re quoting the libertarian, right wing view?
Did i trip into Kiwiblog by chance
The stuff kills workers Mike. Never forget that
Make it cheaper and easier for your members to get and eventually you’ll have bugger all left
Its an interesting way to eliminate the union movement
But do please carry on with you neoliberal argument
BTW, taxing works. After decades of smoking my parents finally quit when the costs just got too great for them to afford. And they did not find smoking that pleasurable, hacking their lungs out, for those that like to glamourise the practice.
Some tax is fair for sure speaking as a smoker myself. I think a point that’s missed is all of those tax dollars stolen from smokers could’ve been money spent in the local economies of said smokers. That is all.
The incremental tax increases are just cruel, most addicts find another thing to give up to pay the extra couple of dollars to maintain the habit. Just put a packet up to $100 and be done with it rather than t keep squeezing a little extra tax revenue without shocking people into quiting. Better still any Govt that’s brave enough to just ban them fullstop in their first year will take a hit in the polls but be loved 3years later by all the ex smokers.
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