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.
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
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.
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.
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’s worse than that as it’s short term tax gains now but increased public health spending later from those same taxes when they start getting cancer in a decade or two.
But lower pension costs, and overall it saves money to allow people to smoke themselves to an early death. Even if you count the cost of their treatment, it’s cheaper than 20 extra years of pension payments. It’s a terrifying but sound economic policy.
Using the UK numbers, around 80k people die of smoking per year, costing the NHS alone £2.6bn, their full state pension cost is around £900m, so there is a sizeable gap between just the NHS cost and the amount on their pension as the pension saving has to be significantly more than the remaining years on their state pension as there is another set of costs next year, and the year after and so on… Total cost per year is estimates at about £12bn, but direct government cost is a bit over £4bn. This doesn’t include the fact that it ties up beds for other people who do not smoke, which means worse outcomes fro them, and this has knock on costs.
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.
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.
Yes but actually most western governments do this. The Aus health minister made a comment to the same effect a couple of months back. The US even collateralises loans using payments from tobacco companies that have not yet been made, as compensation for harm to public health that has not yet been done.
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.
I’m not sure about how accurate it is, but I read something a while back about it being the opposite in canada. You don’t spend more on smokers because they don’t live long enough to get to the really expensive part.
This is just a foggy memory so I’m definitely open to being corrected.
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.
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.
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.
Taxxing won’t do anything because structurally the Rich have the most power in the system. The only way to fix this is to systematically remove the Rich through whatever means and remove the means which enables them to exist.
And when the planet is about to go tits up they’re just going to “thank us for all the fish” and say “so long” as they disappear into a different dimension. Truly selfish
Considering that nicotine isn’t the harmful part of smoking, the amendment they had about greatly reducing how huch nicotine a cigarette was allowed to have would have been a pretty stupid move, turning people into chain smokers.
Nicotine is addictive and harmful to your health. It restricts blood to the brain, narrows arteries, and causes blood clots. echelon.health/nicotine-the-good-the-bad-and-the-… there are benefits to nicotine too but they don’t it as a prescription drug because of the drawbacks.
People aren’t literally addicted to the habit of smoking, they’re physically addicted to nicotine. It’s pretty much unavoidable. Any smoker who tells you they just like the ritual, has been conditioned to think that by mentally associating the ritual with relief from the physical symptoms of nicotine withdrawal.
Sure, removing the nicotine isn’t going to be an immediate barrier from continuing smoking. But the point is that once the person can no longer get nicotine from smoking, they will almost certainly make the decision to quit themselves. And that has the potential to be a more profound decision for them than simply having the product taken off the shelves and being told they can’t have it.
They aren’t removing all the nicotine. They were just cutting down how much each cigarette has. So for a smoker to get their nicotine fix, they’d have to smoke three times as many cigarettes.
It’s still tobacco at the end of the day, you can’t remove all of the nicotine because it occurs naturally. It occurs in many other plants too, but in levels which doesn’t inspire any motivation to remove it. In the same way I think delineating between elimination and reduction of nicotine is a moot point. Smoking is not pleasant, and every smoker has overcome this unpleasantness to become nicotine addicts. There is no reason other than nicotine why it continues to propagate in all countries and cultures today. And with nicotine-reduced cigarettes, smokers must simultaneously engage with that unpleasantness more, and still come to terms with diminished returns vs. the nicotine they previously ingested from 1 cigarette.
As for the amount the nicotine can be reduced by, I’ve seen a wide range of estimates from 50% to 90+%. I don’t think we’ll ever really know what’s reasonable and scalable without any such product actually on the market.
If the idea is reducing it to the point where smokers don’t think it’s worth it to smoke anymore, then just ban them. Otherwise you absolutely will have people who will smoke 3-4x more to get their original fix. Or they’ll take deeper draws and hold it longer like people did when lights were introduced (there were studies on this)
Without taking away from your point, I’ll point out that you’re comparing hypothetical isolated cases of pointless and fruitless self-harm to a supposed reduction in tobacco harm generally, which is one of the leading causes of premature death globally, and is also fully preventable (while the actions of irrational persons is not generally preventable). I think the side you land on has more to do with one’s politics generally than the actual issue. Does “do no harm” take priority if the consequence is “generally more death”?
No I literally think they should ban them instead of playing stupid games like taking most of the nicotine out and hoping people make the healthier decision vs the more destructive one of smoking more.
Whether nicotine reduction would even lead to a net reduction in harm is the actual hypothetical here, and there are reasons to believe it wouldn’t, which is all I’m pointing out. It just sounds like a shitty policy, regardless of ideology.
What are those reasons? It sounds like you’re trying to say that tobacco as a cultivated plant for smoking propagating across the world over the past few centuries is because it was trendy.
Without getting into my personal involvement and anecdotes, ‘introduce RNT products and hope for the best’ is far from an accurate characterisation of NZ Labour’s Smokefree 2025 Action Plan.
I’m not arguing nicotine isn’t addictive. It’s the whole basis of why there’s good reason to believe people woule just smoke more to get their fix, and all the harm that comes with the added tar consumption that would involve.
It also wouldn’t be the first time a political party proposed a poorly thought out policy that sounds good on paper but doesn’t help in practice. If there is some accompanying successful medical study that motivated such a policy then I can be convinced otherwise, but until then let’s stop pretending these doubts are not obvious and reasonable.
Then why is there no sufficient demand for there to be a place in the market for RNT cigarettes currently, if people are willing to smoke separate from the universally accepted purpose of a cigarette as a nicotine delivery device? We aren’t talking about the difference between blues and reds - we’re talking about the difference between an effective nicotine delivery system and an ineffective one. Specifically in a market where effective smokeless nicotine delivery systems are available (and as accessible as cigarettes). If one just stops to think about how things would actually function in that sort of environment, your argument falls apart for me.
I can’t show you long-term data on the health impact of using RNT cigarettes when they aren’t available in the wild. But sure, here’s a review on shorter-term RCT’s & cohort studies.
As mentioned, nicotine reinforcement and dependence is a key underlying cause of chronic cigarette use. They have a function, whether or not smokers are cognizant of it. When the nicotine is reduced, the cigarette no longer performs this function - no reinforcement, high chance for cessation.
It suggests this benefit extends to important subpopulations whom have disproportionately high smoking rates. In NZ there is a whole ethnic group that could be described this way: tāngata whenua, Māori people.
The review also mentioned the potential for adverse effects, including fostering a black market, or product manipulation. These issues are also presented by outright prohibition. Indeed the RNT strategy itself is intended as a mitigation against these problems, and the review shows they are far from a perfect solution. But taking the same behavioural science approach, it is entirely expected that people would seek alternative black market supply when the decision about availability is made for them.
Even if you consider other positions like the civil liberties argument, what do they want the freedom to do? It sounds like they want the freedom to participate in the act of smoking, more than specifically wanting the freedom to use cigarettes to effectively ingest nicotine. It is understood even among this crowd that nicotine is associated with addiction, which no one desires. At least, RNT’s would sort of reduce their position to “I’m fighting for the freedom to have chronic health problems”. Anyway, they’d still be free to grow their own tobacco legally for personal use, as far as I’m aware.
I’m still not sure if you meant that you think people would be caused to smoke more generally, or just a few. Either way, I wasn’t being facetious when I asked what the reasons were. I can’t imagine what basis you have for it. Like, the fact we don’t cultivate tomato plants for smoking and regulate them as an 18+ product and have a bunch of complicated strategies to address the harm it causes isn’t because there’s no nicotine in the tomato plant, or because the plant leaves are especially caustic and unpleasant to smoke, or anything like that. It’s because the nicotine concentration and bioavailability isn’t high enough to make that an effective delivery device. That’s why tomato smoking never proliferated in Mayan culture and eventually spread throughout the world following colonisation of the Americas, and that’s the same reason why people won’t continue to smoke cigarettes when they are rendered ineffective.
It even seems like what you want: prohibition, but in a more roundabout way. How is that possibly worse than the roundabout way they’re cost prohibitive via excessive taxation?
Sure, in a perfect world we could just ban them, so why have a roundabout? Because the roundabout has specific potential to have a direct impact toward beneficial longterm health outcomes and the elimination of tobacco harm over time, which a more direct approach does not.
The perfect solution would be to go back and somehow stop tobacco use from ever proliferating, but in lieu of that, it’s here, it’s entrenched in every country and culture and things like “outright prohibition” and “complete elimination” are simply unrealistic. On balance, the doubts about RNT’s are unreasonable because of the stakes involved. Statistically several NZers have died prematurely of tobacco-related illness since our conversation began. We need realistic solutions that don’t exist in a vacuum. RNT’s were one prong of a multi-pronged approach which together constituted our generation’s best shot. The UK, Australia, will have been looking at NZ as a test market for RNT’s and other cessation strategies as they have for many other unproven/disruptive technologies, see these decisions made by the Nats, and use it as additional justification to succumb to tobacco industry whims there as well.
It reinforces the effect of the nicotine. That’s literally why tobacco companies were adding acetone to cigarettes back when they were publicly denying it was even addictive.
“Their fix” is based on whatever dosage they’re already used to. There’s not some fixed upper bound that everyone achieves after their first cigarette.
Making cigarettes less addictive would make new addicts less addicted.
I doubt it. I think for most smokers, one cigarette does them for a while. I don’t see anyone stopping at half a cigarette, so I’d guess it would only get smokers used to taking more nicotine in at a time.
Like I said. Mainly because if someone lights up, they’ll smoke the whole cigarette. Not half. But if they didn’t get enough nicotine from one, instead of not smoking again for a couple hours, they may smoke again after just 45 minutes or so. Or even start chain smoking.
Do you know how quitting an addiction works? Ideally… you take less.
That’s not a paradox or a gotcha. It’s the only way people break the cycle. You understand that cycle can be deepened. You seem absolutely confident there’s no other direction.
You seem to think the people having low nicotine cigarettes forced on them want to quit smoking.
And no. I’m not saying there is no other direction. Upping the age every year would work. Upping the prices would work, but is a ln asshole move for a government to make, banning cigarettes would work. Lowering nicotine in cigarettes is what wouldn’t work. It’s straight up something that would make the smoking related health issues of an entire country worse instead of better.
We’re not talking about what they want. An outright ban is an option, here. The goal is to make them smoke less. To make them less addicted. Lowering how much nicotine they get, without changing their habits, would probably help immensely.
Though half at once is the wrong curve. You’d want to drop by 10% a year. Enough to grumble about… not to double how many you smoke in a day.
“Upping the age every year” is an asshole move of the highest order: inequality. You’d tell some people, this is legal, but never for you. That is fundamentally the opposite of ‘you must be 18’ and it cannot be tolerated, even if the motivation is positive.
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