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The proposals for increasing the tax on cigarettes by 17.5 cents per stick and for introducing a minimum price on booze are worthy of analysis. Proposals are also developed for dealing with obesity but I will not discuss those here. The report by the National Preventative Health Strategy is here. [...] The Foreign Correspondent show on ABC TV tonight spelt it out in relation to the disasterous Indonesian smoking situation. Each year 400,000 die from tobacco-related diseases. Indonesia is one of the few nations on earth not to endorse the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control - another is North Korea. Indonesia has low taxes on cigarettes and seemingly stupid politicians – [...] Despite the global financial crisis sales of carcinogens remain strong with BAT profits growing 20% in the year to December 31. BAT is the world’s second largest producer of carcininogens. Quote, The Financial Times: “Although tobacco consumption is declining worldwide, tobacco companies have continued to grow profits during the past decade. In the US and Europe, [...] This article in The Age suggesting that tobacco companies knew that ciarettes contain a pollonium isotope that makes smoking a packet and a half of cigarettes equivalent in radiation exposure to 300 chest X-rays per year. They kept quiet about it as they have with some many of the other deadly features of this habit. The [...] I found this webpage from the Australian Taxation Office on excise charges on alcohol and tobacco products very useful. Taxes ideally should reflect damages of these products which are presumably related to alcohol and carcinogen content respectively. With respect to alcohol this is volumetric taxation rather than ad valorem taxes levied on product value. [...] I have been working for the last couple of weeks on smoking. If you want to get a good feel about the dimensions of the global smoking epidemic I recommend this site. If you wish to become very well informed about harm reduction approaches to dealing with the smoking catastrophe I recommend this site. It [...] A tax on tobacco will encourage the use of illegal, untaxed sources of tobacco or chop chop*. Smoking chop chop means that the Commonwealth Government loses out on revenue (in 2003 the estimated loss was $500 million) but, more importantly, that the tax on legal tobacco to avoid health problems will indirectly create new health [...] The Australian tobacco-growing industry has ended with an industry-government buyout of all producers. All cigarette products consumed in Australia will now be imported. The advantage for the anti-smoking lobby is that the price of illegally-grown tobacco (‘chop-chop’) will increase so taxes levied on legally-sold cigarettes will have a bigger impact in reducing smoking and its [...] The Harvard School of Public Health have published a study showing that the nicotine content of cigarettes has increased in the US by 11% during the period 1997-2005. Nicotine is the primary agent that makes smoking addictive. As I recently suggested it is inappropriate to define smoking in terms of the number of cigarettes [...] An attractive paper by Jérôme Adda & Francesca Cornaglia in the September 2006 American Economic Review (a preprint here) re-examines popular accounts of the price-sensitivity of the demand for cigarettes. Smoking can be defined as a process by which agents give their brains a nicotine hit. Nicotine is a psychoactive stimulant and one of the [...] I got a buzz from reading the Becker-Posner blog on libertarian-paternalism. Their argument is in part a criticism of C. Sunstein & R. Thaler’s ‘Libertarian Paternalism is Not an Oxymoron’ .Sunstein & Thaler claim it is both possible and legitimate for private and public institutions to affect behaviour while respecting freedom of choice because people’s [...] I posted just a few days ago on the possibility of banning cigarette smoking in cars where children are present. It happened today in South Australia – a bill was introduced to fine those who smoke in cars with children.Supporters of the bill claim smoking in a car is 20X as dangerous as smoking in [...] An interesting range of vaccines are being developed to deal with nicotine addiction. They prevent nicotine from activating pleasure centers in the brain. If you are a smoker but don’t get to use this vaccine all is not lost. Scientists are also developing a vaccine for preventing smoking-induced lung cancer. So far experiments have been [...] Most people know that smoking is the largest preventable cause of death in the world today. Smoking is the only legal product which kills people when it is consumed as intended. A recent report claims smoking kills half the people who regularly smoke.Defenders of smoking and opponents of smoking bans however claim that, if smokers [...] One of the most provocative papers at the recent APSAD (Australian Professional Society on Alcohol and Other Drugs) Conference was given by Don Weatherburn, director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. In it he argued that the high arrest rates of Australian aboriginals were not due to their social disadvantage but primarily [...] |
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