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
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.
Y’know, I gotta admit, I would have never pegged this article as one that would make my notifications go wild. 🤣
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
New Zealand is scrapping a whole lot of things right now.
10 years worth of environmental protection laws is another thing being scrapped.
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.
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.
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
I’m surprised Lemmy has this take. Why is it anyone else’s right to take your right to smoking away?
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
At the cost of 50 years worth of current addicts smoking more.
If we doubled the nicotine per cigarette, d’ya figure they’d all smoke half as many?
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.
So this effect only works in one direction?
