I grew up in a household with two smoking parents, and it sucked. So on a personal level, nothing would be better than the world collectively giving up the nasty habit. However, I would never, ever advocate or vote for forcing people to do that. Why? Because you could make the exact same case for every single vice. Alcohol has zero benefits for your health - don't even try to give me the "but wine has antioxidants" B.S., the math between the negatives and positives is still in the red (ha!). How about caffeine and other stimulants? Foods too high in fat? Red meat? Too much sunshine? XYZ thing that is considered "unhealthy" this week by the "experts"? Don't get me wrong, reasonable limits imposed at a societal level can certainly make sense (banning smoking from restaurants and airplanes, having blood-alcohol driving laws, et cetera). But the fundamental question here is do you really want to trust your personal decisions on health, diet, and entertainment to those elected via a popularity contest? And the "experts" they solicit their advice from?
If you're familiar with the political culture of Australasia, you'll realise it's an overwhelming "nanny state" culture.
Also, you'll realise that Australia/New Zealand have the highest HDI indicators of any nation globally with mean winter temperatures above 10 degree Celsius.
Why?
Because Australia and New Zealand have a particular cultural value others don't.
They trust technocratic experts to know what's best for people. And implement.
I’m a resident of Melbourne, in the state of Victoria, which had the longest pandemic lockdown in the world AFAIK. It certainly was at the time the lockdown ended, at least.
Victoria recently had an election wherein the government which was responsible for implementing the lockdown was re-elected. Notably, the state government’s pandemic response was dictated by facts, indeed the chief health officer responsible for informing politicians and implementing policy was a medical practitioner and undeniably an expert in public health matters.
During lockdown and even still, there continue to be protests against the government for their pandemic response, despite the re-election being a clear sign that the will of the people is that they want a government led by (or at least informed by) experts who know what they’re doing.
It’s important to note that there are examples within the Victorian government which show the opposite, though. They have aided logging of old-growth forests, despite saying they won’t allow it to continue. They’ve repeatedly and demonstrably used tax dollars to fund infrastructure projects in electorates where the ruling party has a slim majority (so-called marginal seats).
My point is the Victorian government is far from perfect. It’s been a year since the last lockdown ended, yet the lockdown is still the thing people discuss when it comes to policy. It’s the most invasive action a state government has taken, affecting so many people. It’s what people remember. And it mattered at the polling booth last month, when people voted the government back in. They even saw an increase in the seats they hold, from last election.
It should go without saying: voter preferences seldomly condense down to a single issue. A party gaining or retaining power doesn't mean broad support or opposition on a single issue.
Again: technology or science experts deal with facts (or implications of setting policy), not setting policy or the will of the people. As an example: COVID can & did kill people, but where to set the threshold for acceptable mortality is a policy issue that is orthogonal. Not dissimilar to actuarial accounting.
>Notably, the state government’s pandemic response was dictated by facts, indeed the chief health officer responsible
Dictated by culture. To say that everyone else was dictated by things-that-weren't-empirical is nothing short of a naive reading of how laws and social policy are set. There are values.
> despite the re-election being a clear sign that the will of the people is that they want a government led by (or at least informed by) experts who know what they’re doing.
I would heavily challenge this just because the opposition is utterly incompetent in Victoria. I am as against the lockdowns as they come and think they border on criminal as an action taken by the state against citizens. A disgusting violation of human rights I never thought I would see in Australia in my lifetime and honestly changed permanently how I viewed the moral compasses of my fellow citizens.
However they were done and now I have to vote based on what is going forward and the policies put forward by the liberals in Victoria are, frankly, moronic. Matthew Guy is a buffoon who has no place in leading the party.
So I gritted my teeth and voted Labor. But using that as an endorsement of lockdowns or Victoria covid policy is absurd. I know many who feel the same as me and acted similarly.
There seemed to be avenues open for people to register their displeasure at Labor, via preferential voting. Two minor parties 'Angry Victorians' and 'Sack Dan Andrews' party were obvious targets to put before Labor, along with the usual alternatives such as Green, Reason, Legalize Cannabis (although those risked electing someone instead of a Labor candidate). Yet the Labor vote was overwhelming. It very much seems that there was only a vocal minority against the lockdown policies. The displeasure with Labor seemed more about their environmental policies, with the Greens and Legalize Cannabis taking left wing votes away from Labor.
I don't vote for clowns or lunatics which it is fair to say both "Angry Victorians" and "Sack Dan Andrews" are both.
I'll never vote Greens again until Lidia Thorpe is gone, shagging the heads of outlaw motorbike gangs is disgraceful behaviour for a member of parliament and completely disqualifies Greens as being a serious party from my point of view (at least while she remains a part of the party). And honestly the longer she remains the more I have to question the judgement that the members of the Green party show at all and makes it more likely that even if she eventually leaves I will never vote for them again.
Reason I do like the look of tbh and will consider them going forward. I can't say I am the most hyper-engaged voter so can't pretend I was fully aware of them or what they stood for. But looking them up now I like a lot of what they say and prefer their general policy stances over Labor.
> However they were done and now I have to vote based on what is going forward and the policies put forward by the liberals in Victoria are, frankly, moronic. Matthew Guy is a buffoon who has no place in leading the party.
Hear hear. The Victoran Liberals are a bunch of muppets. I disagree with a lot of actions of the Andrews government, however there was no functional alternative.
Remember, much of the fourth estate innately will be crassly negative, for commercial reasons. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars. New Zealand for example has some remarkably shrill national news stories about remarkably petty crime.
> There's a big difference between being an expert & representing the will of the people (aka policy).
Yes, and the technocrats don't always get it right, at all.
Democracy works because nobody actually trusts the technocrats. Just like nobody trusts the investment bankers, politicians, real estate developers, police, lawyers.
However, Australasia has had a remarkable run of success via eventually doing what the technocrats tell them to do.
> Also, you'll realise that Australia/New Zealand have the highest HDI indicators of any nation globally with mean winter temperatures above 10 degree Celsius. Why? .... culture
If you want to look into temperature vs productivity you should note these populations overwhelmingly have ancestry from colder weather climates
> They trust technocratic experts to know what's best for people. And implement.
It helps to be small & pragmatic. People (mostly) follow the rules and politicians (mostly) only implement rules with broad support. Police have wide discretion to apply laws and (mostly) do this to benefit public good.
That's not to say we don't have problems, of course, but this particular law is seen as a compromise approach to public health that more-or-less works for everyone.
Your other statements about AU/NZ culture have been extremely questionable, but this one is just complete nonsense.
The idea that there is a genetic urge to impress England is bizarre, typically about 50% of people support becoming a republic. Some recent data in [0]
Australia's original status as a penal colony seems to be held onto as trivia externally but is entirely irrelevant in modern discussion (as it should be as it stopped 150 years ago). Thinking that this is something Australians think about suggests that you have a very outside perspective.
I don't know what a culture of needing to be a better place to live than America means. I don't think being a good place to live is a culture, I think it's an objective of a society.
As we'd say here: "Yeah, Nah". This is a caricature of parochial English thinking of the colonies from the 50s, and is entirely divorced of what Australia and New Zealand are like today.
As someone from a southern US state who faces similar "caricatures", there's no need to pretend and hide your feelings. Instead, I think we should join together against those who would oppress us and keep us down and uninformed in modern society.
It would already be a republic if the last referendum wasn't nobbled by the government at the time, where the only choice was between the status quo or giving more power to the historically untrusted elected government.
"With republican models of one form or another winning a majority in opinion polls prior to the referendum, it was expected that the republican referendum would pass. However, the question put was for a particular model of republic with a head of state appointed by Parliament. This was opposed by some supporters of a republic, who preferred a directly elected head of state. Some of these, such as Phil Cleary, advocated that republic supporters vote "No" in order that a future referendum could be put on the directly elected model. Some commentators—including the president of the Australian Republican Movement, Malcolm Turnbull—identified this split within the republican camp as a key reason for the referendum's failure."
Individual responsibility is tied to economic rationalism.
With 100% devolved individual responsibility, you create market failure.
Nicotine based addition is a pure example of market failure.
To advocate for 100% unhindered individual responsibility, is to advocate against economics.
No rule-free economic market, free of arbitrary constraints, is ever truly rational.
That's because market failure is the default state of nature. The rich take from the poor, the incentive to economically specialize is lost due to theft.
"Personal responsibility" is a gross simplification of the complexities of political and economic science.
I would never simplify the enormous complexities of human computer interaction and UX, fields I know nothing about.
Don't over-simply how difficult a decision regulating nicotine was, and how many decades of academic careers have been sacrificed to come to this consensus.
Cable news slogans can never summarize the efforts of thousands of doctorate wielding technocrats arguing endlessly over the solution to nicotine.
> I grew up in a household with two smoking parents, and it sucked.
It sounds like you're saying that their freedom to inflict harm on you was more important than your freedom from the harmful health effects of secondhand smoke. Can that be true?
I presume the two smokers did more than just smoke. If they were parents They probably also provided food, education, love and whole lot of other things than just secondary smoke. Life tends to be a complex mix of good and bad.
For sure, and I'm assuming the parents were great in every other respect. Assuming the best — that they didn't understand the harm of secondhand smoke — wouldn't a ban have been helpful to them in the same way that a ban on lead paint is helpful?
Sounds like Prohibition but for cigarettes. We know how that went. We also know what banning marijuana hasn't worked out too well. At the start of Covid pandemic South Africa banned the sales of cigarettes for about three months. Result was lots of unscrupulous people became rich [0][1].
Isn't there a big difference between what Australia is doing and those prohibitions?
I think one of the main reasons those went so terribly is that people were already used and/or addicted to drinking/smoking, so of course they continued doing those things illegally. But this policy tries to make sure that people never start smoking, by making it not legally available to every who is now young enough to most likely not have started already. Those who smoke currently can (with this policy) continue doing so legally, so there's less demand for black markets etc.
I can't fault the theory and can only share an anecdote. It was illegal for school children to smoke when I was in school, 80s into early 90s. So much so that kids caught smoking were expelled from school. Kids still smoked. Perhaps it was a different time and perhaps this time it is being done right.
I think what it comes down to is who is decided what's harmful and do you trust those institutions.
Is spanking harmful? It seems close to one of those things that get one into trouble with CPS
What about letting a kid walk home from school on their own? We've seen parents get into trouble for that.
How about letting the kid watch tv or eat too much junk food?
What about teaching them certain ideas, ranging from racism to creationism to socialism to Amish-like beliefs?
If you presume that parents love their children and want to do what's best for them and you inform the population of the collective belief on what is good or bad for them, parents will do their best to make careful trade-offs and are in the most informed and most invested position to make those decisions.
Obviously some people are just terrible parents, but if there's any doubt at all I think we should err on parental sovereignty. Likewise, when considering what is beneficial or harmful to one's self, for the same reason, I think we should err on the side of individual sovereignty.
There are cases where individual or parental authority should be overridden, but to my mind those should be chosen very, very carefully.
Involuntarily inflicting second-hand cigarette smoke on a child is unambiguously harmful and there's no credible alternative interpretation or slippery slope involved here.
Ah well sure but when the smoking rates drop low enough, smoking related healthcare costs greatly exceed the cigarette tax receipts. NZ is a small country and needs to contain the costs of its socialised healthcare. Is there a fundamental ‘right to give money to Tobacco companies’? Buying cigarettes is banned, smoking isn’t.
I'm not a utilitarian because I think there are many things that we should do that can't be justified with a straight-forward look at the bottom line. Judging things this way can end with things that are pretty ethically dubious, e.g., forced abortion for fetuses with condition X, where X may be various levels of impairment whereby the resulting human is not profitable.
Agreed, but the OP is obviously unconvinced by the moral observation that Big Tobacco hack people’s brains for profit while externalising the costs to society.
Is one allowed to plant their own tobacco if they're inclined to do so? What about other tobacco products like rolling tobacco? Is that banned from sale as well?
The bill says that sale of smoked tobacco products will be prohibited if the recipient was born after 2009-01-01. Just giving them a smoked tobacco product is also illegal if it occurs in a public place.
You underestimate alcohol.
It is a cheap and versatile desinfectant, that can be made relatively easy in remote areas or by people who want to live more independant.
Furthermore, hot alcohol, especially beer, is a very strong medicine for respiratory infections.
Saturated fats:
Nina Teicholz: A short history of saturated fat: the making and CURRENT
unmaking of a scientific consensus
I do not understand why so many adult people favor a nanny state; it means to be treated like a child or an idiot and to promote that all people get forcefully treated like this. One should fight this with all means.
Edt: I forgot, that a moderate amount of alcohol each day (i.e. 1 glas of wine) reduces the probability of dementia when one approaches death.
>>o you really want to trust your personal decisions on health, diet, and entertainment to those elected via a popularity contest? And the "experts" they solicit their advice from?
Maybe not every personal decision, but certainly decisions that scale should be handled by actual experts. And yes, actual experts exist who actually know more than you and I, and can make better decisions based on the actual data they have gathered and knowledge they have gained, vs our 5minute Internet search.
And much of what you see as a "personal decision" is actually decided by corporate money. When smoking was completely unregulated, corporations advertised and distributed at will. Smoking rates declined dramatically when advertising and distribution was constrained. Yes, we can make a decision collectively to not make certain kinds of harmful activities readily available and pushed on the people by sophisticated influence campaigns.
From the article:
>>"Thousands of people will live longer, healthier lives and the health system will be NZ$5 billion (US$3.2 billion) better off from not needing to treat the illnesses caused by smoking,"
Personally, I'm not thrilled to be paying into the insurance system to support the massive healthcare costs of smokers. If they can be made to pay in their FULL cost, then that is fine.
Otherwise, go make your personal decision - grow and cure some tobacco, and roll your own. Nobody is stopping you. The only thing they are stopping is every corner store selling it.
> Smoking rates declined dramatically when advertising and distribution was constrained.
The tobacco companies agreed to have TV cigarette ads banned because there is no real reason for cigarette preference other than what you started smoking (this is why you see ads that were targeted at youth), and they couldn't not advertise when competing with so many others. They figured that if they were all forced to the same level they would save a lot of money while gaining the benefit of a PR win as well as removal of the mandated 1:1 anti-smoking ads.[1]
You can see the same kind of techniques in play with recycling and fire-retardants in corporations getting together to work to legislate things that people think are pro-public-interest but are really pro-corporate with effects on the public ranging from benign to actively harmful.
I would disagree. Multiple studies have shown that moderate alcohol consumption lowers HDL cholesterol and reduces strokes. Also, if you use alcohol in a social setting, then you are getting added benefits from human-to-human social interactions where you are likely to have more conversations, talk more, smile more. Obviously those benefits are not directly connected to alcohol - but they pair well together.
>Multiple studies have shown that moderate alcohol consumption lowers HDL cholesterol and reduces strokes.
Source(s)?
And who paid for the studies?
>Also, if you use alcohol in a social setting, then you are getting added benefits from human-to-human social interactions where you are likely to have more conversations, talk more, smile more. Obviously those benefits are not directly connected to alcohol - but they pair well together.
Come take a walk through my home town on a Friday and Saturday night at chucking-out time, there's plenty of "human-to-human social interactions", and with a lot less of the "smiling" part.
I think there are levels to it though. Smoking is across the board "fucking awful". Whereas a glass of wine a day isn't going to really stress your liver (presupposing no existing issues), whereas a pack of smokes a day absolutely will do damage to your healthy lungs. Also second hand smoke is a big deal.
I don't think this is a fair comparison, on one side it's a whole pack of cigarettes per day and on the other one glass of wine.
How about we compare two bottles of wine every day with a whole pack of cigarettes. I think that's comparable and both would be terrible for you.
I hate smoking, I had a really hard time quitting 8 years ago and in general I dislike being in a room where people are smoking.
However my grandmother smoked 1 cigarette every day with her morning coffee after breakfast her whole life and it did her no harm whatsoever. I think with most substances moderation is always an important factor.
> However my grandmother smoked 1 cigarette every day with her morning coffee after breakfast her whole life and it did her no harm whatsoever. I think with most substances moderation is always an important factor.
How many cigarette smokers have the willpower to only smoke one a day?
I usually have a glass of wine with dinner :) . I have an actual chalk mark on a measured standard "glass" lol. I do not have more than that. Sometimes I'll have a beer instead if it's fish and chips. I don't drink more than that, except maybe on the weekend during a social "thing". Those aren't very often though, mostly once a month.
yes, you can buy a single glass of wine at many bars and restaurants. while somewhat triggering to the oenophiles, you can also buy wine packaged in 12 oz cans, which is close to a standard pour if split between two people.
I get that this was probably a tongue-in-cheek question, but like many other things, drinking follows a power law distribution. there are many more moderate drinkers than heavy ones.
I don't exactly know how this bill works, but I wouldn't consider banning the public sale of something to be the same as forcing someone to do something.
Presumably even if it's illegal to sell tobacco in a store it could still be legal for someone to possess and use tobacco in a private setting.
Can I play devil's advocate and say it's not black and white, and currently a lot of people make really bad decisions and the worst ones are the ones that affect surrounding people. Vaccines are another hot-button issue where making the wrong choice causes you harm and those around you as does smoking. I lived in Japan for a year and never smoked in my life but probably "smoked" a hundred packs after being in some environments. You can argue to avoid such environments but the logical extreme of that is people being forced to stay inside for fear of unvaccinated people. There is clearly some gray area here IMHO.
I mentioned this already in a comment, but although this is a good law, the price of cigarettes is so high that most people have already moved to disposable vapes, which you can get from any Dairy (Kiwi word for a corner shop).
To top that off, Crime in NZ post covid has been pretty high, and Ram Raids (driving a stolen car through a shop front) are becoming more and more frequent. With cigarettes being so expensive, they are usually a pretty common target. A dairy worker was stabbed to death a few weeks ago by people who were probably intending to steal cigarettes [1]. I can see less and less retailers stocking cigarettes as the risks outweigh the benefits.
Also, the price of groceries in NZ is extortionate [2] and combined with crappy wages (every man and his dog are moving to Aus to double their salary), no one can afford to buy cigarettes.
Crime in NZ has been trending downwards for over a decade. There has been an increase in certain types of crime, so if cherry picking, increasing crime can be made a thing. Not true tho.
> . A dairy worker was stabbed to death a few weeks ago by people...
They stole the cash register, not the cigarettes.
> Also, the price of groceries in NZ is extortionate
Yes. Far too high, a very profitable business with many barriers to entry
> combined with crappy wages (every man and his dog are moving to Aus to double their salary),
This man and dog is not leaving! That was true for many decades. Ever since the neoliberal reforms that were introduced in NZ with no planning or intelligence (cratered , but it has started to turn around recently. Wages going up in NZ and Ozzie is entering some sort of very strange twilight zone.
Is this a good law? It depends. Prohibition has a very bad history. This is a different approach, so maybe
Crime in NZ has been trending downwards for over a decade.
Reported crime does not equal actual crime. With police response time in the hours range, and a lack of prosecution, people increasingly don't bother reporting crime at all.
I remember once the emergency operator pretty much said "look it's going to take a couple of hours, do you really want to bother going through with this?". This was in a city about 2km from the police station.
Lived in Auckland in 2014 and again in 2020. The difference was massive. Suddenly every convenience store had plastic barriers protecting the workers from stabbing. Places in the CBD that used to be OK to hang out were suddenly not.
But we're constantly gas-lighted into being told we're all imagining it, as police presence has all but disappeared (lots of "community officers" though).
> Reported crime does not equal actual crime. With police response time in the hours range, and a lack of prosecution, people increasingly don't bother reporting crime at all.
Yes.
There is much more reporting now. Many domestic assaults for example.
As nonsmoker I'm strongly against this, when did alcohol prohibition, war on drugs or their COVID restrictions worked? You will just anger people and it seems completely unnecessary considering there is steady decline in smokers and there are surely more dangerous issues to deal with, in case of NZ it would be pandemic of obesity.
In Australia, you can't advertise cigarettes, and cigarettes have to be sold in faded green packaging (without logos etc.) with only health warnings. You can only get cigarettes if you know which brands to ask for.
That has prevented some people taking up smoking. I think it's fair.
It can work in a country like New Zealand that has -very- tight controls and people will readily report others for breaking the law. I think it will greatly reduce smoking. I don't like it, personally, but it absolutely can work like gun laws that are applied relentlessly (see australia and england vs US gun deaths)
Assisted suicide is legal in New Zealand. What if I want to smoke myself to death? Absolutism from the state is so noxious. Make cigarettes prohibitively expensive and difficult to acquire sure. But complete prohibition is an infringement on our natural right to decide what to consume.
You wanna smoke yourself to death? Do it at home. Most people want to smoke themselves to death in the open, around other people though. It's nobody's right to pollute our air for the sake of their bad habits, thus regulations.
First, aren’t smokers paying for it through the high taxation of cigarettes?
Second, wouldn’t this argument also apply to people that drink themselves to death? Or eat themselves to obesity? Or snack on sugar to diabetes? Should we not cover someone’s medical bills if they attempt suicide or drive at high speeds and crash?
I’m saying this as a non-smokers who hates the smell of cigarettes.
everybody dies one day....and most...use hospitals and health care....so the argument is just a waste of time imo - and frankly....the air is connected across the globe...so that argument is kinda weak too ..
What if you want to blow yourself up with a hand grenade? Not allowed. Or crash a light plane into a building? Not allowed either. Or infect yourself with smallpox? Not allowed.
The absolutism here doesn't sit with the NZ government.
Politicians generally reflect their societies' attitudes. (In the US in the past, too, before the Citizen's United decision.)
> New Zealand's smoking rate is already at historic lows, with just 8% of adults smoking daily according to government statistic released in November - down from 9.4% last year.
if this was accomplished without prohibitions, how many negative consequences (black markets, organized crime, smuggling, adulterated cigarettes) is NZ willing to tolerate to get to zero? One would think that at some point, you get down to a hard core that will never stop.
Cigarettes are so expensive that no one really smokes them in NZ anyway, everyone has already moved to vapes.
I doubt that there will be a black market for tobacco as, by the time you smuggle them in, they still won't be that cheap.
Also, MPI (Ministry for Primary Industries) are even more strict on importing organic materials (or any biological for that matter) than Customs are on drugs.
The point of the law is to prevent anyone born after 2008 from buying cigarettes. Hardcore users that are older than that can continue to purchase tobacco.
Illegal cigarettes are something deeply ingrained in my mind as part of the trade from the mafia. I'm now imagining guido looking men with kiwi accents.
I used to (illegally) order cartons from Eastern Europe when I was a broke college kid. They didn't taste as good, but were less than half price of US cigarettes!
When I was a kid in the 80-ties parents sent me to buy cigarettes for them. It was not illegal to sell them to minors. I guess there'll be reversal of that practice in New Zealand.
When I was a high school kids in the 90s, the dairy across the road from the school would sell individual cigarettes to the kids for 10c each. Utter scumbags. How many addictions began with that thin end of the wedge.
"dairy" is Kiwi for a convenience store, Off License, Superette. I remember being surprised moving overseas and calling it a dairy nobody knew what I was talking about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_(store)
Edit: It hit me that over the next few decades they are probably going to invent some really nasty things to put in vapes, like they did with cigarettes (that were made to be a lot worse than the "mere" nicotine and smoke inhalation of tobacco smoking), so don't read this in 20 years thinking that people in the past thought whatever they're doing in the future is safer that cigarettes, it could eventually become worse for all we know.
Also, at least in the US, the vehicles (solvents) are unregulated, as are the heating devices (I have been told by some vaping friends that they like the "toasted" effect at the end of a long pull, which is the polymer heating, fracturing, and crosslinking. Ugh.
PEG is a common vehicle; some molecular weights are so safe they aren't even regulated (called GRAS -- "generally regarded as safe") and some are quite toxic. If you were making the drug delivery device for some pharmaceutical your delivery system would be closely regulated to make sure both drug and vehicle were safely administered at all times. But these drugs are not regulated and neither are their delivery systems. You can sell whatever the hell you like.
It's similar to tattoo inks -- some are OK some are really bad (like copper or sooty inks), but all the FDA can do is post some web pages rather than require safe inks.
To be clear I find this absolutely horrifying. As someone with chronic respiratory limitations, it is distressing to see people damage themselves this way. It is their right, but you can't make me like it.
My aunt smoked heavily, she always said "I might as well enjoy my life, even if there are fewer years of it" or something like that. The problem with that is that you lose capacity to enjoy life and then you generally die horribly. I know there are exceptions to this - smokers with no severe impairment - but they are relatively few.
> I have been told by some vaping friends that they like the "toasted" effect at the end of a long pull, which is the polymer heating, fracturing, and crosslinking. Ugh.
I'd be very interested in reading more about this. Do you have any info on hand? Thanks.
I have no idea if any of this is true, but an argument you might hear is that companies that make some profit can capture the agencies to make a lot of profit, while companies that don't make any profit can't exist. So, you could defend absolute bans even while admitting they are excessive if you don't have faith in the system to keep a more nuanced policy stable.
Vapes will be covered in other legislation related. This isn't the only move the govt is making.
> It will be accompanied by a slew of other measures to make smoking less affordable and accessible, including dramatically reducing the legal amount of nicotine in tobacco products and forcing them to be sold only through specialty tobacco stores, rather than corner stores and supermarkets.
Why do they think this won't increase the allure of cigarettes in general? Feels like prohibition has always been a questionable idea, regardless of what its target is, and it has pretty much never worked as expected.
It's especially awkward given that people's interest in tobacco has already fallen to new lows without it (the article suggests only 8% of the adult population smokes now), so it feels like it could be completely counterproductive, while doing nothing could have caused interest to crash even more.
Smoking cigarettes has always been something that was started pretty young. It is an outlier who starts smoking after the age of 18. This law will affect total smoking in the population only as much as it can affect the ability of minors to obtain cigarettes. By making it a black market, this may backfire, since it is easier for an underage person to purchase something illegally from an illegal supplier than it is for an underage person to purchase something illegally from a legal supplier. However since NZ is an island nation they may be able to pull this off since smuggling in cigarettes may not be lucrative enough compared to something like cocaine or heroin. Of course the penalties would have to be more than a slap on the wrist for that to be the case.
Another way it can backfire is that this is yet another reason for many people who already have negative sentiments toward government overreach and government in general to be angry. I would be more than a little shocked if many of the people who participated in the January 6 hoedown didn't have a whole laundry list of grievances, imagined or otherwise, that contributed to their motivation to show up there that day.
Prohibition has worked for a very long time to control the widespread use of many materials, chemicals, and practices (ie building codes) across the world. Alcohol is relatively simple to create and store, and to hide consumption. Alcohol is effective at almost any quality, that doesn't immediately kill you. Cigarettes are a very different beast from alcohol. Unlike marijuana, given the data on second-hand smoke, many people would be eager to report use of cigarettes wherever it was found. Growing the tobacco is another big issue for producers. I don't believe there's a compelling set of reasons indicating cigarette prohibition would be ineffective.
In 2 generations, I'm not sure why anyone would be making cigarettes...when they could make alcohol easier.
South Africa has high taxes on cigarettes making cigarettes relatively expensive. The result is black market of unregistered cigarette brands. A good number come across illegally from neighbouring countries. Perhaps NZ being an island nation might be able to control illegal imports better.
> The result is black market of unregistered cigarette brands. A good number come across illegally from neighbouring countries. Perhaps NZ being an island nation might be able to control illegal imports better.
This is in the short term. This is also a slightly different situation, which is beyond the land-access. High taxes are an implicit indication it's still ok and for the wealthy, making it a status symbol. Banning cigarettes in NZ will put pressure on future generations to not start at all. This will not be 100% effective, granted for the next generation. From a cost-benefit perspective, if you are going to bring in black market products, why not get people started on meth? Meth has become quite prevalent in much of africa and partly because it's cheap.
Any data on it having counter effect on the actual consumption and prevelance? I believe are the negatives were secondary but it was effective in primary goals.
When the US raised the drinking age from 18 to 21, binge drinking in college skyrocketed. Alcohol producers are now some of the staunchest defenders of our current drinking age.
The problem here seems cultural, not legal. College dorms and frathouses seem like the perfect climate for creating a culture of binge-drinking.
1. A bunch of dumb, young adults.
2. Sent away from home to live together, with only their peers for role models.
3. With few responsibilities, and not enough schoolwork to do to keep themselves busy.
I'm not sure why anyone would expect any outcome that didn't include way too many drugs and way too much partying. The drinking age isn't a problem, that set of inputs would produce the exact same thing, whether it was 18, 19, or 35.
If you actually want to solve college binge drinking, kill the frat life, close down all the dorms for local students, and have them commute to school.
The prohibitionist puritans never learn. Laws that reduce smoking permissiveness in public places? Sure, Laws that set rules for advertising and legal buying age or location? Okay, why not. Banning tobacco completely in a spasm of nannying, health-fanatical "for your own good" intervention in people's personal body choices? Why? Have decades of absolutely idiotic drug laws and the previous idiotic bans on alcohol not shown why this is not only a bad idea practically but also just morally wrong by basic definitions of individual's rights to autonomy over their own bodies?
Doubtless there are many people here who personally dislike tobacco and thus think it's just fine that others should be banned from using it, but remember, where one set of laws tries to ban some personal way by which a person uses their body, its guiding principle can be expanded widely to include all sorts of other things you do support being able to do.
As a basic notion, the whole idea of the state acting as if people should be treated like little children in situations where their actions don't cause non-voluntary damage to others is just plain toxic in so many ways.
It's almost like the government is abdicating their own responsibility for regulating markets and protecting public health, and instead sanctioning criminal activity to handle the issue.
Ironically, as someone who’s been to a few communist countries, cigarettes are common, legal, and cheap. Micro managing people’s personal lives is an old school progressive philosophy that goes back to Prohibition, and before that, it was the Puritans.
> She added that the legislation could close the life expectancy between Maori and non-Maori citizens. The overall smoking rate for Maori citizens is at 19.9% - down from last year's figure of 22.3%.
8% among general population but 19.9% among Maori.
Could you point me to the numbers that suggest a rapid fall over time or are you implying it based on the change over the course of one year mentioned in the article?
For me, the only way to reduce smoking and drug usage is through education -- prohibitions just end up increasing the black market, violence and incarceration rates.
Educate educate educate. Don't even try to solve this within generation, this is something which need to be really through generations. Educate people how bad cigarettes are for them and others and you can use also soft propaganda as painting smokers as bad people in media etc instead straight up banning smoking, you can just make smoking extremely appalling.
Wouldn't it be better to increase number of smoke-free zones? For example high fines for smoking on the crosswalk (very annoying, especially that the smokers always walk faster for whatever reason) or at the bus stops. That might influence the number of people questioning if it is worth it to constantly search for a place to smoke.
Not a Kiwi, but in Germany and Poland there's no prosecution for that
Why stop there, why not ban alcohol and sugar as well? But don't touch my coffee - I need that.
I'm not totally against government regulating vice, I do wish it was done at a local level so that in the spirit of federalization we can see what works and what doesn't in small experiments before other states would voluntarily adopt it. NZ is a small state so not too many people will be impacted.
I do think in an environment where the government is responsible for health outcomes it makes sense to pass mitigating regulation to minimize the costs of health outcomes. Though I do worry we may end up with mandatory exercise and a Canadian style widely encouraged assisted suicide model.
>> Canadian style widely encouraged assisted suicide model
Canadian here; we're pretty much the polar opposite of our southern neighbours and I'd argue both of us are too extreme in our approach to health care, but I don't think you can accurately argue we have a "widely encouraged" model for ending your own life; except maybe compared to some states where life starts at ejaculation. There's a big difference between "access to" and "encouraged to".
It is indeed encouraged, I'm somewhat disabled with chronic fatigue, a condition many institutions don't even believe exists. So I'm sensitive to what people like me go through. I'm fortunate that I can pay my own way but others I know who rely on government assistance have privately relayed to me that they have been personally encouraged to look into MAiD. The "maybe you're faking it" has morphed into "maybe your life just isn't worth living, and we're still going to deny you disability... so think about it."
Personally I'd love for more research into ME/CFS and Long Covid but I'm pretty sure it'll get pushed into the too hard basket and MAiD will be over used as the easy solution.
> We see this type of abuse everywhere it is legalized.
Is that really the case though? The example you've highlighted there is indeed pretty crappy, but it's not evidence of the problem occuring "everywhere it is legalized".
> humanity probably can’t handle this responsibility.
Again, evidence please. Assisted Dying stuff seems to be actually useful for people in very bad situations, where death is "actually better" (for various measures :p).
That other people are not working with it in good faith isn't (by itself) an indication of humanity not being able to handle the responsibility. At least, it doesn't seem that way so far (to me).
This is analogous to the argument for guns in every classroom. Sure it can help in some cases, but is it worth the risk when we know it will be abused?
You're acting like you're in "the right", when it doesn't seem to be the case at all.
"Guns" have significant evidence showing abuse. The only example I've (personally) seen of abuse of assisted dying, is this Canada thing.
There are other places with assisted dying laws, and they don't seem to be having the same problem. Maybe they indeed did have a period of crappiness like this (but fixed it), maybe they didn't have it go bad, (etc).
You can make such predictions if you know enough about human behavior and are a student of history. The idea that the sick and infirmed should do us all a favor and kill themselves is a historical default. From Aboriginals leaving elders behind to fend for themselves, to the Ättestupa for the Vikings. More recent examples include the Nazis who started with ‘merciful deaths’ for ‘life unworthy of life’ in a program called Project T4. They started with the totally brain dead and slippery sloped the rest. Ended up with the incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught, and elderly people Initially people had to petition the authorities letters and give their reasons for recommending their family member be euthanized. Letters you can still read and the arguments in them sound exactly the same as they do today. Hitting on the major themes of ‘who’d want to live like that’, ‘it’s for their own good’, and the more honest ‘they’re costing us a bunch of money that we can’t afford’.
Many old people tend to get cranky and are a pain, plus they have expensive medical problems and gambling habits. It’s extremely common for their children to wish them dead before all semblance of an inheritance and possibly their last hope at a middle class life is gone. Many people will be left with the choice of watching their middle class life disappear or successfully convincing their parents into assisted suicide. Some people even take matters into their own hands. Killing people for your own benefit is murder but if you convince them to suicide ether by persuasion or making their life unlivable then now it’s legal. A lot more people will take that option. You might think people are nicer than that but you’d be wrong. I used to have access to search logs and the percentage of people looking to covertly drown their disabled child is crazy pervasive. And we know how many went threw with it as they later search for funeral arrangements. No one wants to do anything about it because it is seen as an effective solution to a hard problem.
The real issue is that we’re on the cusp of major medical breakthroughs that will vastly improve the lives of many chronically ill people. But instead of spending on research though it’s considered easier to convince people to kill themselves via gaslighting. The fact that disabled people are expensive is the major impetus for researching treatments. Give medical insurers and governments an option to gaslight people into a cheaper ‘treatment’ and they will take it instead and the little money spent on on such research with dry up. Seriously research the history of chronic fatigue.
I really like a lot of what comes out of NZ, but not this sort of nanny state action. I believe it will have all sorts of negative consequences out of the public light and control. It's a high-level combination of "Won't someone think of the children?" and "Do as I say, not as I do". Definitively a political winner that doesn't impact anyone of voting age for the current crop of NZ politicians.
Not being from NZ, I don't feel it's my place to comment on this legislation or speculate on its effectiveness in that country. Too many variables for me.
But, I think this is a very intriguing way to construct a prohibition. I'm very aware that trying to regulate away vices in my country (the U.S.) has a spotty history at best. If people want it, they're going to get it, and the alternative black market and its attendant criminality is often worse than the initial problem. But, this is a new wrinkle that (I assume) is also aware of that phenomena and is trying to mitigate it. I'm very, very interested in seeing how this plays out. Obviously, hoping for the best!
I don’t know a ton about NZ, but I never would’ve imagined they have a meth problem. Last I heard Aus and NZ both have incredibly expensive drugs since most (all?) drugs have to be imported?
While obviously smoking is bad, how is this approach acceptable and not discrimination?
Imagine if the approach to getting rid of ICE cars was to say 'nobody born after this date will ever be permitted to drive one, but a person born one day earlier can' - there'd be massive outrage.
Yeah but smokers are a minority (significant but small relative to the overall population) where as ICE cars are almost universal and actually serve a purpose to society, whereas smoking has no societal advantage beyond self pleasure/addiction.
Big news? It's certainly not a topic of active conversation in NZ.
It was talked about for a day or two when it was announced a while back - I haven't seen a single news article about it recently, nor has anyone talked about it. The opposition political parties haven't made a big deal out of it either that I've noticed.
I don't think anyone really cares. With vaping still being allowed - it's all a bit moot. Anyone born after 2008 is going to be buying a vape.
How generous of the grown ups to ban things for other people but not yourself. Like it's objectively a good thing but it seems so silly and immature to me. How good could society be by now if we could get every generation to pass restrictions on the vices of the next generation only, I suppose.
Edit: I know talking about down voting is discouraged, but since I'm being downvoted, why not go further? Alcohol is also objectively bad, why not implement this for alchohol? You would presumably even avoid all the rum running and speak easys and mass organized crime you had with the US doing the first time around if everyone who already enjoyed it got to keep doing it. Would you also find this law but for alcohol reasonable?
But I don't understand that, if we're operating on under the premise that smoking is bad for all (which it is), then why not ban it for all now? Thats sets a horrible precedent.
It's kind of a harm reduction-style argument. The premise here is that banning smoking for a group more likely to already be addicted might be a non-starter, so let's at least reduce harm where we can.
A fairer way might be to say "people that don't already have an established history of smoking can never buy cigarettes going forward", but that immediately creates an unhealthy incentive for everyone to go out and buy their first pack right now.
Any credence to it's better to prevent someone from starting than trying to get someone to stop? Trying to find a way to see this from a positive view than the super cynical way it comes across. I know I'm stretching for it, and it kind of hurts.
Giving credit where it's due: stretching to support an argument that isn't your own & doesn't align with your values is a lot of what makes this place great :D
It’s absurdly addictive. And as I understand it smoking as we know it has more to do with marketing and the intentional suppression of research indicating serious harm than anything else. Hell, I might liken it to generational trauma.
I’m not sure of the specifics. Does the law prevent you from growing and curing your own tobacco? There might be something important there - I don’t think folks would make their own cigarettes, but they would make their own alcohol. Feels like there is a difference.
Many countries in the world (like AUS and India) also prohibit tobacco growing. It's hard to do in the U.S. because it is a native species--literally, like cannabis, a weed.
My assumption is that if you illegalized the sale of tobacco but not the growing of it that cigarettes would not have wide spread use, whereas with alcohol I think most communities would end up producing it.
Which makes it seem different, like cigarettes are this highly addictive thing that gets pushed on you because it makes some one else wealthy but otherwise would not have much demand. Which makes comparisons to alcohol feel flat.
That is the point I was trying to make when asking about laws about growth/personal production.
But I wonder how many people with COPD due to smoking would say "I am really glad I have been smoking and would never give it up" ?
That is the thing, people start at a young age because it is "cool", when they get old, they wish they never started. I never meet a longtime smoker who has never tried to quit. Eventually many just give up trying to quit.
I wonder how enforceable this law is ? I suspect illegal markets are already being planned :)
Yep. My dad is one such person - smoking has destroyed his health but it's so addictive he didn't even give it up after multiple strokes, heart attacks and surgery.
The idea that he's still smoking because "he chooses to do so" and "he likes it" makes me fucking laugh.
This law doesn't even try to wean addicts off cigarettes, accepting that many of them have no hope of giving up or even just moving to vaping. It seems like a fair approach to treat this population of addicts as something to be managed as they age out.
> Alcohol is also objectively bad, why not implement this for alchohol?
Well we both know that will never happen. But yes, alcohol is harmful but I think smoking is even more so.
If Cost is NZ only concern, they can always charge more for healthcare for people who drink/smoke, price depends upon length of use. But we all know that will never work. Where I work, just about everyone when signing up for healthcare always ticks the "I do not smoke" box to get a cheaper rate. And I doubt there is a sure fire way to verify how much people smoke or imbibe over their lifetime.
> But yes, alcohol is harmful but I think smoking is even more so.
I think that's more due to the relative ease of tracking the harmful effects of smoking. I don't think the majority of harm caused by alcohol ends up on death certificates as "alcoholism" and there are much more non-fatal negative outcomes from alcohol.
It's not that difficult to track lung cancer deaths relative to smoking population and find the excess deaths but tracking road fatalities, spouses abused, kids dropped out of school and even the secondary effects like children of alcoholics not receiving help with schoolwork are much harder to track. Second hand smoke is bad but your chain smoking dad can still help you with your math homework.
That would be unpopular in a country that has free healthcare, making 'free' conditional will scare everyone with sliperly slope arguments that it will lead to a US-style system
Not to mention the further down the slope of "tax for this, fee for that" type carrot and stick bullshit you go the more you defeat the point of pooling the cost of something (either via insurance or via the state).
Me too, doesn't really happen anymore so it seems like with time, some sensible regulations and education everything works out? Why the need for a ban?
Why couldn't it happen? If you get to make laws like this you can do all sorts of things. The only people it hurts are the ones who don't get to vote on it, after all. The people doing the voting can rest easy knowing they can drink as much as they want. You can't just raise taxes because then the people voting would also have to pay them. Maybe you could just raise taxes for people under 18 and grandfather yourself into the cheaper stuff.
I can't upvote this enough. This is a mind blowing precedent for New Zealand, and scarily, every country. I can't imagine how Boomers in the USA could be drooling at this concept.
The younger generations are (correctly) panicking over climate change, but the octegenarians in congress are working tirelessly to make sure that we'll continue burning the planet down for decades after they've kicked the bucket.
How very appalling. Smoking is a human right. Pipes smell wonderful; tobacco generally tastes great and has a positive effect on one’s mood and attention.
From what I heared, anti-drug laws may be construed is that selling is a different matter and possession and production are accessory. That's why possession of small amounts of cannabis for example is decriminalized while traffiking is still prossecuted where I'm from.
This is arguable because addictive substances will be sold with the intention of creating dependence, not unlike the loot box topic, thus it cannot be argued that they act under good intentions.
And to be real, the wonderful smell acts on your parasympathic nervous system because of appetite, for the smell is associated with roasted food. Add to that the childish reflex of sucking on a nipple. So it is pretty much an eating disorder, in my humble opinion.
> And to be real, the wonderful smell acts on your parasympathic nervous system because of appetite, for the smell is associated with roasted food. Add to that the childish reflex of sucking on a nipple. So it is pretty much an eating disorder, in my humble opinion.
Even Freud once said "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". There is no scientific basis for the whole "oral fixation", so calling it "childish" is pretty ignorant.
Edit: "Contradicting the Freudian psychosexual development concept of oral-stage fixation, the Duration of Breast-feeding and the Incidence of Smoking (2003) study of 87 participants reported no causal relation between the breast-feeding period and whether or not a child matures into a person who smokes."
I think it's more likely the "great taste" is down to it being an addictive substance. If smoking animal dung got you high, people would probably rationalise about it tasting great as well.
I'm not saying that's wrong. I thought that's understood. I don't understand the processing in detail, far from it. I just mean, the point that the GP defended really makes it worse.
Industrial manufacturers add tons to improve the taste like honey, licorice, probably stuff to negate the bad smell, like menthol.
I'm convinced this contributes to the primary pathway because it's a primary instinct and this thought allows for a better comparison to alcohol - drink, dehydrate, drink more, repeat ad nauseam.
Does anyone actually start smoking because they need nicotine? I've never heard that. It's always been peer pressure and only then do they get dependent on the nicotine.
For non-office workers it's not always convenient to make coffee while you work, so perhaps that's the difference. And to be clear, I don't think it's harmless (but I think the degree to which it is more harmful than caffeine, if you exclude the non-nicotine-related harms of smoking cigarettes, is probably exaggerated)
I started smoking because my housemates did and continued due to the hunger suppression and the nicotine hit. I also drink coffee, it's not the same rush.
Nicotine self medicates for a bunch of reasons. It may even be beneficial for certain neurodegenerative conditions. While the answer is, let people use "real" medicines, or safer forms, remember people themselves know all the reasons why something like a cigarette is the best choice for them personally, much better than some overall one-size-fits-all prohibition for everyone. I'm pretty sick of some people trying to control others. If you don't like smoking don't smoke. If you fear the health consequences, don't smoke, even warn others. But who are you to control what others do with their bodies? (enter public healthcare - which is why socialised anything is incompatible with individual liberty)
I don't really mind this. I don't believe it's appropriate for the government to prohibit the use of a psychoactive substance, but this law doesn't do that. It just bans a particular delivery mechanism which is known to be particularly harmful. That seems reasonable.
Except alcohol already has a delivery mechanism that's probably the healthiest option, whereas smoking to get nicotine is inherently anti-social and harms others with secondhand smoke. Anyone in NZ who wants to be addicted to nicotine can still dose using a vape, which doesn't have the same downsides for others.
It might be more comparable if NZ were banning some more dangerous way of getting drunk that also gave bystanders cancer.
