Be Excellent To Each Other

New Zealand is considering raising the price of a pack of cigarettes to NZ$100 (about £50).

What would the social implications of this be? Would it bring a magical end to the habit? Would it just drive supply underground? Would people turn to crime to fuel their habit? Would addicts not eat properly to afford cigarettes? Would smoking become a status symbol.

Would would those on here that smoke do? Would it FORCE you to just give up?

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/h ... -1.1066614

Wel helloooooooooo smuggling!

Yeah, legislating vices out of existance always works.

You can't force someone to stop smoking/drinking/eating/whatever. It's got to be something they decide to do for themselves. Because breaking a habit - any habit - is bloody difficult and takes a lot of willpower, and you can't impose that from outside.

I've always thought that if you have any intention of using price pressures to force social behavioural change, like making people quit smoking, then do it large. A price increase of 50p a year does nothing to discourage people, you just take the hit and carry on.

I currently spend about £80/week on cigarettes. If that became £500/week, then I couldn't afford to carry on smoking, and would have to quit.

Or, as curio says, I'd find somebody selling smuggled cigarettes by the boxload.

People would just smuggle them in from abroad. More so.

Mugging teenage kids would be an alternative to £50 packs.

On the radio it said that UK figures prove that for every 10% rise in the price of cigarettes, the number of people that smoke drops by 4%.

yeah I'm pretty sure that the increasing price of cigarettes has informed quite a few people's decision to quit as has the smoking ban, I've even heard people citing it as a reason to quit. To someone on £15k a year buying cigarettes at £8 a day probably seems a lot more loony than it did when they were a fifth of the price.

I remember when the B&H girls would come around the pub and swap whatever you had left in your packet of cigarettes (even if it was only one tattered Soverign) for a new, full pack of 20 B&H golds. Happy days.

I thought this, but then I don't think they could smuggle them in large enough quantities to satisfy demand, so either pet here would not be enough to go around or the black market price would also shoot right up,

No. How old are you, exactly. This sounds like something from the 70s.

I remember when the star prize in a penny falls machine was 20 Regal with a fiver taped to them. Last time I went it was, I shit you not, a packet of two part epoxy.

haha! What?!?! Brilliant.

It's easy to do to turn a profit. Transit van/caravan, loaded up with Galouises and cheap returns on the ferry. Use several passports to not show up too often onr ecords and explain your trips abroad and accept a 10% loss when you do get turned over. At £25 profit a packet, you could easily absorb things those losses due to customs. The officers rotate on a regular basis, so paying one off would be tricky, so use different ports at odds to their schedule. or use a light aircraft and take Marmite and HP Sauce to Holland, and bring back more cigarettes, using small airfields.

Was in Sheffield in 1998/9

Alas, New Zealand is distant from pretty much anywhere.

I'd like to see smoking exterminated as a habit using whatever mental tactics might work. But I suppose one way to look at it is this: if you could buy, say, cocaine for 10x the price legally as you could illegally, would you do it just to be within the law?

Strangely I was looking at UK smoking statistics just yesterday. Highlights:

Yearly Tax Revenue in the region of: £10 billion (or put it another way, 10,000 million).
Yearly Money spent on programmes to help people quit, and to provide free nicotine patches, etc: £145million (or, 1.45% of tax revenue).
Cost to NHS of smoking-related diseases, plus benefits of maintaining spouses etc. due to resulting incapacity: £2.7 billion.

Overall profit to government: Lots.

Now, call me cynical, but if the government really had a genuine ideology about stopping smokers, you'd think they'd commit a large amount of the revenue (revenue they'd presumably be happy to lose if everyone just stopped today), towards programmes encouraging people to stop.

What it actually is, is a token effort that I'm sure has a tiny impact compared to what a £6 billion campaign would have.

You've even missed out the fact that smokers help with pensions by typically only having short retirements.

I went off the idea of cocaine as soon as the price fell low enough for it to lose its exclusivity. It's no good when the chavs can have it, too.

There's plenty of unsavoury benefits to having people die early from self-inflicted diseases, particularly when a venn diagram of smoking/alcohol/drug abusers vs. those contributing least to society financially/productively has lots of overlap.

ah, Sheffield is pretty much in the 70s.

I'm sure there is a demonstrable relationship between the cost of cigs vs. the number of people smoking, but as others have said or implied, this will only surely hold up to a certain tipping point. If 20 cigs cost £50, or even £20, people would simply look to the black market en masse. (Many already do; I can't be arsed with this @ £8/pack but would certainly do so at £20+).

Besides which, whatever the govt. claims to think about cigarettes, they are a fantastic tax cash cow for the UK exchequer, even after NHS costs are factored in. I hate cigarettes despite being a smoker and would love to see them magically waved away, but the fact is that this simply isn't going to happen, least of all via some crude de facto prohibition measure such as this. (It's not going to happen anyway; black market = no tax revenue but with the same, possibly worse health disbenefits - and costs)

Bottom line? The government doesn't really want people to give up smoking, although they would like to mitigate the harmful effects of this on others, i.e. through passive smoking. Hell, passive smokers aren't increasing the tax take, are they, and their smoking-related illnesses cost money...

As Gnomes said, if the UK govt. was actually serious about smoking cessation, they could throw a proportion of that annual tax take to pay for mass therapies that actually work (rather than near-useless NRT that coincidentally helps the big Pharma's coffers). But of course, they're not, but they do need to cover their arses and *look* like they are, as well as (quite rightly) protecting the interests and welfare of would-be passive smokers.

I'd always assumed that cocaine was an expensive and somewhat exclusive drug (I'm completely naive when it comes to drugs though) so I was rather surprised when I found out that a couple of my (now former, thankfully) colleagues were regular users.

I'm not sure of the current price of or tax revenue from cigarettes in New Zealand at present, and whether that's compatible to the situation here. I know that cigarettes aren't as expensive as here (UK and Norway currently almost tied as two most expensive in terms of cigarette prices on comparable brands).

It's piss cheap nowadays, and cut with all sorts of rubbish, I've heard.

I think that's because of the image of cocaine-snorting yuppies at cocktail parties in the 80s.

And Robocop.

I guess NZ is much more isolated geographically than the UK, so something like this would have more of a chance of having the desired effect; it's not as though boatloads of Kiwis could jump on a £12 ferry ride to continental Europe and load their cars to the gunnels with cheap fags for 'personal consumption', only to flog for £5/pack even now.

Still think it would be folly though; at £50/pack it would be well worth the criminal fraternity's while to set up a full blown counterfeit and/or professional bulk smuggling operation.

Coke is absolutely everywhere and almost socially acceptable these days I would say, even amongst the professional classes.

No idea how much it costs as I've never bought it, but it certainly isn't expensive.

£20/g down from £77 in 1998.

Cheers mate.

Looks like all those vastly expensive measures to keep it out are working really well then

I'm generally of the opinion that basically all drugs should be made legal and properly taxed/regulated.

There is no way I could ever support any legislation allowing recreational use of heroin.

I think it's about £120 an hour to rent a plane, plus fuel, plus other stuff. The cost for a commercial ticket is something like £30,000 although some companies will take you on and train you, but jobs are very hard to come by.

I get mine from the local sweet shop, it's only 49p for a can there.

Even I am very reluctantly coming round to this way of thinking - heroin excepted as Mali says (it's just too toxic, addictive and harmful), possibly along with stuff like really powerful hallucinogens like LSD?

As long as people are educated as to the risks (which are reduced when pure, pharmaceutical grade) and it's taxed to the hilt, that's got to be preferable to what we have now, which simply _is not working_ and furthermore will NEVER work. These substances exist; they can easily be made. That's never going to change, so we either deal with these facts of life in an adult, mature, holistic manner (making the best of a bad job), or we continue to (very expensively) kid ourselves that we can do a King Canute?

Protip: save yourself lots of time, money and illegality by skipping directly to huffing cement dust.

You can even do it at your desk instead of having to stand in the cold, wind and rain!

Crikey, really? It was £40-50 only a few years ago.

I agree. That's the problem with the unregulated, uncontrolled black market - just as it is with other drugs. (Nicotine is, of course, a drug - an alkaloid - very closely related to the active ingredient of cocaine, ironically enough).

I don't see how making it illegal is preventing recreational use of heroin. Dealers at the moment exist entirely outside of the law, having properly regulated retailers selling cleaner products, I think, is better than the current situation.

Not to mention (some of) the huge amount of money we spend in policing drugs now could be invested in rehab treatment.

Hm. Why not make retail cigarette sales illegal, and put it on prescription. Start at a pack of 20 for your £7.40, and every year reduce the quantity(/length) by one(/mm). All proceeds directly back into the NHS coffers.

None smokers would get a prescription and sell them on the black market.

Edit-shift: And only allow people who had originally checked the "smoker" box on the surgery sign-up form to have the 'scrips.

And when signing at a new surgery, it must be shown on the notes from the previous one. And make them smoke one there and then to see if they go green/puke/fall over.

And what is to stop people from lying?

And what about people like me who aren't regular smokers, but sometimes like to have a smoke or two (usually when out at the pub).

Lying? "When I signed up 10 years ago I checked the 'non-smoker' box but now the law's changed I'd like to change it?" "Tough."

Blag, like I do on the increasingly-rare occasion I slip.

Yep, I am (was) that guy.

I remain of the position that drugs should be illegal. Making it legal just because it's hard to police is pathetic. Drugs are hugely damaging, psychologically and physically. At least you can function capably while having a fag, the same of which can't be said when you're tripping balls.

Making it legal is the first step to making it socially acceptable, and I never want to live in a world where I can be sitting on a bus next to someone who can legally get out their tin of cocaine and take a bump in front of me and anyone else looking. It would be hugely damaging to people's lives, as much as if not more than cigarettes and alcohol. Make it legal? The whole idea is so fucking ludicrous.

Thinking about it, GPs probably have more scientific methods available to them than that.

I didn't turn green, puke or fall over the very first time I tried a cigarette.

Animosity and/or resentment towards smokers, or any other drug user, seems pretty pointless to me. Such are the frailties of human nature. (Besides, they should be thanked for paying everyone else's taxes )

Whatever people like to believe, smokers don't make an active, conscious decision at age 14 or whenever to become nicotine addicts for the rest of their lives; it's human nature - hubris, basically - to think "it won't happen to me, I can control this", if they think of it at all.

Yes, people are stupid. It's for this very reason that the knowledge that smoking greatly increases your risk of disease and death doesn't make an impact on many people's decision to smoke. People are much too basic, and money is the only thing they can comprehend. It's why the price of a thing is used to control behaviors to buy that thing - see also minimum price of alcohol. The government often has to introduce broad financial measures because it's the only thing that forces people to cut down on something for their own good.