Health experts say axing plan to block sales of tobacco products to next generation will cost thousands of lives
This headline SCREAMS ‘conservative’:
- bad for people
- bad for healthcare
- generate tax cuts … for the wealthy
No surprise that it’s from an anti woke virtue signalling bunch of reactionary conservatives, then
New Zealand is scrapping a whole lot of things right now.
10 years worth of environmental protection laws is another thing being scrapped.
Y’know, I gotta admit, I would have never pegged this article as one that would make my notifications go wild. 🤣
I think it’s more that pro-smoking plays better with their right wing voter base than taxes. That and the fact that ciggies can still be bought, so the younger generation will still be able to get them. I mean, it being illegal has never stopped any drug. The best way to get rid of smoking is just to ramp up the tax and wait for everyone to take up something cheaper. Even the most hardened smoker at my work now vape instead. Not amazing for you, but got to be better than inhaling all the crap in cigarettes.
Only the mega rich have a solid reason for caring about tax cuts. Everybody else should be clamouring for better services, as that is what will really be cut to give those billionaires more money to hoard.
You over estimate the intelligence of the average person. They hear some billionaire getting a tax cut and pretend that will help them.
How very evil of them. I personally don’t think smoking, or any other substances should be banned. But they just admitted they think they should be banned, but won’t ban them because they’d rather have the money. Exchanging people’s lives for profit.
Makes you wonder how much lobbying Big Tobacco did.
They just had an election and the government flipped from centre-left to centre-right. It could just be the classic conservative “our position is whatever is the opposite of the left!”
Winston Peters (NZ First leader) is a total alcohol, tobacco, and racing (horse, greyhound, whatever) industry shill. I doubt he exactly needed to be bought, but this is certainly part of his price for being part of the coalition government.
ACT (secular libertarian free market folk) probably mildly supported it, and National (general centre right; largest party) is probably much the same.
No I blame Seymour for this. Luxon went for it because Winston cock blocked him on foriegn ownership and he needs to fund those tax cuts.
Big tobacco doesn’t really need cigarette sales anymore. They are all in on vape brands, where they can sell the liquid at ink-jet prices to customers for a huge markup at $6500 per liter. That’s why you see vape shops on each street corner. The distribution is all streamlined. The website talks to the DHL warehouse about what stock is available, customers can subscribe to weekly delivery plans and the warehouse is filled by some factory in china.
I believe the ban affected vape products as well.
Just out of curiousity have you ever seen liquid sold at $65/10ml? I usually pay 50-100x less than that
Hard to say because they are very sneaky. We do know that Big tobacco ran a fake grassroots campaign with an imaginary dairy owner front man. (“Dairy” is the New Zealand name for corner shops/ drugstores)
Tagging you @AnAngryAlpaca - they may not need it but their greed didn’t get the memo.
Their campaign strategist was an “ex” tobacco lobbyist
Lol sounds like this increases tax revenues by increasing the number of addicted smokers buying cigarettes and then taxing the sales.
Really sound government policy there.
They have actually admitted this is going to be revenue gathering. NZ has some of the highest tobacco tax in the world.
Basically their election promise was tax cuts, which they intended to do by allowing more foriegn ownership of real estate and taxing it.
After the election they found out they could only govern with the help of a populist party and a libertarian party.
The populists won’t allow more foriegn ownership of real estate. Meanwhile the libertarians’ wet dream is stuff like more
lung cancertobacco.So we get shitty last minute law changes we didn’t see coming, like this one.
Wait, they want more foreign ownership of real estate?? Are they high lol. That’s going to price out every last young person there from homes that’s not already priced out.
Yeah it was straight up one of their biggest election promises.
What can I say, their core base is landlords, boomers, and people who want leopards to eat faces.
They are supported by boomers and farmers both of which own property and are happy to flog it off to the highest bidder. They don’t care a jot for the rest of society not having a place to live
Everyone could see that the foriegn buyers tax wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t going to raise enough revenue and was also illegal. It was obvious that something was going to get cut to pay for taxes. It’s not like this wasn’t pointed out ad nauseum during the election
The populists won’t allow more foriegn ownership of real estate.
I don’t see a single problem here. Fuck, I wish Australia would get behind this.
Also good, fuck prohibition laws. Leave them in the fucking past where they belong. If I want to slowly kill myself by inhaling burning plant matter, then that’s my decision. The taxes I pay more than cover my eventual cost to the state’s healthcare system. The government does not get to dictate what I do with my own body.
It doesn’t thou. The cost of smoking to the state is fucking massive
Actually, a LOT of studies do show that no, in most countries, taxes are far from enough to cover the cost of tobacco induced diseases.
Tax revenue that you’ll have to plow right back into the health care system to treat expensive lung cancers. But hey, that’s only 20 years down the line, so you look good now.
Yup. It’s really effective. I’ve paid my share of lung ruining tax in my lifetime. And for most of that time I’d be happy to defend my right to soil my airways to something close to the death.
I’ve been clean for over a year. But that addiction is so fucking emotional that you let them squeeze you dry and you almost applaud it. The perfect capitalist drug.
Glad you’ve put up the fight and made it through the other side.
Cheers mate
This article uncovers an awful cancer of the platform: There are way too many who buy any conservative narrative if you frame it as freedom.
The thing I find hilarious is that a few weeks ago, when there was talk of the UK doing the same sort of thing, everyone was pointing to this legislation as an example of how it has worked elsewhere.
It didn’t even last a year! All it’s done is slightly annoyed a handful of teenagers for a few months.
Funny enough, it was a conservative government pushing it too.
It’s not that crazy, considering it won’t affect older people. Old Tories can continue to smoke while the young can’t, it’s basically the Tory way.
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In Washington State, it’s recently illegal to sell tobacco to anyone under 21. Placing it on the same level as alcohol or weed.
Shit really? I somehow completely missed this one when did this happen?
It was 2020. It’s honestly been interesting to see. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31348515/ is a study from before 2020 stating that 4% less of 18-20 year olds smoked when the age limit is increased to 21. I couldn’t find any specifics on Washington state though.
Awful reason, but fuck these laws. Declaring a person forever disqualified from what other people will still be allowed to do is obviously not the same thing as ‘you must be 18.’ It is infuriating how many people pretend there’s no difference.
Ban smoking for everyone or don’t ban smoking. Trying to be “clever” about equality under the law is just fresh discrimination.
You want money? Tax the companies, not the customers. Take as much as you like. The alternative is, they don’t get to exist.
Nope. @Landsharkgun is right. Zealand already has some of the highest tobacco taxes in the world. Tobacco is incredibly expensive here.
What happens is the addicts spend all their money on insanely expensive tobacco and their kids go hungry.
These laws came after years and years of rising prices, massive taxation, plain packs with disgusting health warnings, free nicotine patches and free gum for anyone who wants to quit.
It has been working too. Our smoking rates are way down.
I’m really disappointed that we did the hard yards on this and now these turkeys are going to dismantle over a decade’s worth of work and bring a whole new generation into lung cancer land.
It makes perfect sense. Cigarettes are cancer death machines in an addictive package. They should be banned. However, we’ve learned from hard experience that making addictive drugs harder to get just leads to addicts trying even harder to get them. So what’s a practical solution? Grandfather in the current addicts and try like hell to keep everyone else away from it.
Equality doesn’t come in to this. You do not, in fact, need to protect people’s right to addictive cancer sticks.
As a human being with my own rule over my own body I have the right to do with it as I please.
If I want to consume addictive cancer sticks until I die a slow, painful death, I have the natural freedom to do so, and laws, taxes or fines won’t stop me until I’m really locked away.
So I support other peoples freedom to smoke. It is just inhaling smoke from burning plant matter, which may be an irrational choice, but is my choice.
If you do that, then you should also forfeit your right to use publicly funded hospitals that already struggle enough with people suffering of conditions they did not ask for voluntarily. Smoking is not just a cost for your body, but for society as a whole, hence the justification in a ban
The high tax on the cigarettes covers the cost of treatment for the few folk who get cancer from smoking.
While I see your point, this could be extended to people doing dangerous sports for fun, eating unhealthy foods or engaging in any activity where one could get hurt.
Then grow your own. Your natural right of control over your own body doesn’t extend to the markets and industry of the society you live in.
Motivation is irrelevant - this kind of law is intolerable.
You wanna limit it to current users? Say that. Have a national registry of whoever’s bought them before, and if they stop for six months, they’re off the list. Treat it like a progressive opioid program where the government supplies them directly by mail, if they fill out some preachy postcards.
Age limits are only legitimate because of physiological differences. A 12-year-old cannot be trusted the same way as a 22-year-old. But today’s 22-year-olds are no different from next year’s 22-year-olds. Or the next, or the next. Declaring some of them unfit is worse than baseless age discrimination. It is creating second-class citizens, forever barred from… whatever.
Allowing bad precedent for good reason would create tremendous problems later. People would propose all kinds of exclusionary bullshit, where old people get to do stuff forever and young people never will, and they’d excuse it by saying ‘well you allowed it for smoking.’
If you think that’d never happen - I will remind you this law was defeated by assholes who think more people should smoke. So they can funnel more wealth to the wealthy. Good faith and sensible governance do not need more obstacles.
New Zealand, highly conservative about drug use, driving, security and relationships, yet will also go to ridiculous lengths to show how cleaning with a wet mop could be better than with a broom, or using one extra layer of building paper is absolutely essential for the structural integrity of the very work flow process that the entire company follows and is actually part of the new management SIX SIGMA protocol.
Me: “dude, don’t do it, the last guy who touched that broom, he got lost, we haven’t seen him since, but now the brooms come back”
Lol I need a translation, I feel like I got hit with some strong dissociative before reading this comment
Nah it’s my attempt at humour really
Smoking is awful, disgusting, and through the diseases it causes puts a massive burden on the healthcare system… buuuut, educational campaigns to encourage people to stop and limiting it in media/banning advertisements is definitely the way to go over yet another prohibition law.
“yet another prohibition”
another American projecting their domestic nonsense onto the rest of the world
Most drugs are prohibited in most countries, throughout most of history.
You’re thinking specifically of American alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. It is you who is projecting americanism.
I’m surprised Lemmy has this take. Why is it anyone else’s right to take your right to smoking away?
You have a very bizarre concept of what rights are
Perhaps it’s not the right to harm ones self that’s the issue. Should you have the right to manufacture, sell, and profit from harm to others? Be it environmental, oral health, lung health, or heart health, cigarettes are a net negative to any citizenry. Seems in a governments best interest to try and greatly reduce and/or eliminate this leech.
I’m sure you’re fighting against marijuana legalization then to improve public health too.
Unlike cigarettes, cannabis has medical uses and is not nearly as harmful especially if you don’t smoke it (vaping or edibles). It’s not completely safe (hardly any drug is) but it’s on a different level of safe compared to tobacco.
I don’t mind taking away the right for my son to smoke cancer sticks. Much like I wouldn’t mind making Russian roulette illegal.
Why is it anyone else’s right to take your right to smoking away?
I have to breathe your smoke and pay for your healthcare.
