One of my less universally popular posts was the suggestion to only supply addictive cigarette products via pharmacies on the basis of medical prescriptions that depended on patients having significant cotinine levels in their urine. This proposal would eliminate cigarette consumption by the time the current generation of smokers expires since only nicotine addicts would get fags. I liked the idea of selling on the basis of a doctor’s prescription because it displayed the pathological character of nicotine addiction. In pharmacies, too, cigarettes could be sold alongside nicotine replacement therapies – a decidedly safer way of gaining a nicotine hit that again emphasized the intrinsic character of smoking as a carcinogen-producer-induced chemical addiction.
In the last few weeks a comparable policy proposal, that has distinctive virtue in terms of simplicity, is simply to prohibit sales of tobacco to all those born after the year 2000. (HT, IC).
I am happy to endorse this alternative that has the same intent as my original suggestion – to let the current lot of smokers be the last – but which operates on the basis of a simple, identifiable rule. It doesn’t convey the notion that nicotine addiction is a medical condition but has a directness that is attractive.
Cigarettes didn’t become a dominant way of consuming tobacco until after WW1. By the early 1950s it was realized that a catastrophic mistake had been made. Smoking has only lasted another 60 years because the legal carcinogen producers criminally lied their heads off about the known deadly, addictive character of their main product – and because of pre-established nicotine addictions. These criminals shortened the lives of 100 million people during the 20th century. The WHO forecast that 1 billion will die during the 21st century from tobacco-related diseases.
Good public policy should seek to end the continuance of this catastrophic product. Support life!
BTW(1) I was delighted to see during my recent exits and entries from Australian that the duty free allowance for bringing cigarettes into Australia has been reduced from 250 sticks to 50. In my original post I suggested cancelling the concession entirely (the Henry Tax Review sought a tax free quota of only 25 cigarettes) but it is still definitely a step in the right direction.
BTW(2) New Zealand seems likely to mimic Australia’s plain packaging legislation. (HT, DP). (2945)
Why go to this length when the current type of campaigning has been so successful? I think they just need to keep going and the numbers smoking will continue to drop, especially because of the recent win with plain packaging.
Have prohibition policies ever met with much success?
The case for legalising dope is based on prohibitions creates black markets, and in black markets, participants use violence to resolve commercial disputes. In addition, otherwise law-abiding people get criminal records and prison terms.
Have prohibition policies ever met with much success if they do not criminalise the possession and use of the prohibited good, be it dope or tobacco?
In an open and honest debate about marijuana prohibition, such a debate would favour a regime in which marijuana is legal but taxed and regulated like other goods.
Such debates on marijuana legalisation rarely address the implications of legalisation for adults but not for under 18s. The fear of teenagers taking marijuana is what marshals parental support for the continuation of the tough bans.
Without a doubt, a ban would reduce tobacco consumption as do current drug laws, but with many unwanted side-effects.
The owner of this blog seems to have a couple of screws loose. Is he posting from a mental asylum?
(ed) Bye bye Simon Dallas.
Ciggies are so cheap within even the poorest parts of Indonesia that smoking addicts there now include four-year-olds:
http://www.theage.com.au/world/in-indonesia-big-tobacco-hasnt-got-a-worry-20120825-24tlu.html
One such four-year-old now enjoys YouTube fame on the strength of his loathsome (40 smokes per day) habit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4c_wI6kQyE
Saw that one Robert. Difficult to see how these sorts of events are consistent with a sensible development strategy. The kretek cigarettes particularly damaging and all cigarettes cause increased health damages as age diminishes.
Note how big tobacco companies have eagerly hopped in to take advantage of this obvious policy failure.
Again Robert the failure of Indonesia to levy substantial excises on cigarettes produces unnecessary deaths and also poor public finances. See:
http://global.tobaccofreekids.org/files/pdfs/en/Indonesia_tobacco_taxes_report_en.pdf
Indonesia an obviously weak link in the global battle to reduce smoking deaths.
HC: you might find this discussion by Columbia statistician of interest, as it addresses tobacco tactics in coopting expert witnesses:
http://andrewgelman.com/2012/09/cigarettes/
David Friedman’s lectures on law and economics talk of the emergence of the professional liar in courts cases.
he asked the class what would these professional liars advertise on their shop window. the answer is expert witness.
One of the people John Mashey’s link points to was a very respected (now deceased) Aussie statistician Richard Tweedie. I’d be interested if readers knew anything more about Richard. I know he wrote papers disputing causal links between passive smoking and heart disease and lung cancer but my knowledge of statistics is inadequate to assess them.
Out of interest, I just looked through one of his papers looking at Bayesian analyses of some smoking data (BAYESIAN META-ANALYSIS, WITH APPLICATION TO STUDIES OF ETS AND LUNG CANCER), as one of my friends loves Bayesian stuff. They don’t find much difference compared to more standard models and don’t claim to (this is a very decent question given the piles of highly inter-correlated variables). So smoking really does kill you still.
There is probably some bias in the writing, because he tangentially goes off to to say there are differences due to publication bias after not finding differences with the Bayesian model, and points to another paper in the Aus & NZ Journal of stats (my library only has a hard copy unfortunately, which I haven’t retrieved), which is essentially irrelevant to the paper (I would have asked for it to be chopped as a reviewer, not that I know enough stats to ever get asked for something like that). I also assume quite possibly incorrectly that this is a pretty crappy journal and hence the arguments put forward must not have been especially convincing unless he liked to publish good stuff in average journals — I also think it’s almost impossible to statistically control for publication bias in areas like this because whilst I think there are ways you you can detect outright falsification in some instances, it’s almost impossible to estimate relatively systematic effect size changes if they occurring across the board.