this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Creating a new illegal drug market.
In fairness, smoking tobacco is one of the few routes of administration where outlawing makes sense. The overall societal cost is very high, even for non-smokers, as in second-hand smokers and cigarette butts littering. It's one of the few substances that health experts often recommend to make as unattractive as possible, be it through taxation or law.
I don't really mind vaping or heating that much, I'd be fine with making cigarettes illegal while keeping the alternatives. Unfortunately, latest legislation has imposed higher burdens on the latter while doing jack about smoking.
Using the litter aspects of cigarettes as a reason to curb smoking has always been a tough one for me. Say someone quits smoking and takes up vaping. Now we have introduced plastic waste & to an extent e-waste in the form of batteries in the disposable vapes.
I don't have an answer to it but I have at least thought about how there is no 100% environmentally friendly alternative outside of smoking straight tobacco leaf in rolling papers.
The "disposable" vapes are a different issue that needs to be tackled. I'm pretty sure that a meaningful deposit (5 or 10 euros) and the obligation for every seller to accept returns would solve the problem.
It works for beer cans!
In my part of the US, we hardly ever see beer or soda containers in litter. We do see liquor bottles, wine bottles, and sports-drink bottles as litter. Guess which drink containers have a deposit and cash redemption and which don't?
The "bottle bill" works. It creates incentives for all sorts of people, from frugal homeowners to homeless folks, to collect and return containers. Applying it to other products that show up in litter would just make sense, especially dangerous ones like vape batteries or cartridges.
That is the most reasonable route. A "core charge" type of model where you get the addition fee waived if you bring in an old one.
Same scheme they use with car batteries and some auto parts. Although, some auto parts have a core charge as part of a dubious ploy to prevent the aftermarket from getting the headlight for duplication.
I'm not doubting you, but like, what r&d firm is gonna go, welp, this $50 core charge is too much for us, guess we won't do it.
I forget what Chevy it was, but they just released a new model and the $2,500 headlight came with a $500 core.
Source: I ordered it.
I mean smoking itself isn't environmentally friendly. You're taking all the nicotine and smashing it with oxygen, producing lots of carbon particulates including CO2 and CO - greenhouse gases. Yes, it's only a tiny amount, but you don't get that with vaping. With vaping you just extract whole molecules, rather than breaking things down, at least as long as the temperature is properly controlled.
A good vape should have next to no waste. The vape itself should not be disposable, and batteries should last a year minimum even with heavy use. That just leaves whatever container you get your liquid in, which wouldn't be hard to recycle. Alternatively you could use a dry herb vape, along with pipe tobacco - but if we're honest if you have a dry herb vape you're probably not putting tobacco in it. You're going to put in things like lavender and thyme, of course.
You can always ban disposable vapes? Requiring anyone that wants to vape to carry around those massive refillable batteries would do wonders to discourage people picking up the habit.
There are refillable vapes that aren't that size. Though you do throw away the coil/juice container.
Haven't seen one of em biguns in a while.
You're forgetting the harm from all the fires (house, grass, and forest) caused by smokers too.
https://cjr.ufv.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Fires-in-Canada-Originating-from-Smoking-Materials-March-2019.pdf
My understanding is that cig smokers actually save our NHS a fair bit of cash, as they die early & rapidly, and they're a boon to the Exchequer due to the huge sin taxes we have
My country already has a cigarette black market for cheaper imported cigs. Banning them won't work it'll only make it harder to regulate the industry.
Once you spark up it's not obvious at a glance if the cigarette is duty paid or not. There's a marked difference between a lit cigarette and no cigarette.
People will just smoke in bushes. Teens already do so they don't get caught by their parents.
So by your logic, cigarettes shouldn't be taxed at all?
Also, the way this is proposed kind of avoids the issue. People importing cigarettes already smoke, and they'll be able to in the future because this only targets people born after a certain date to deter them from starting.
No, because I don't believe a solution that captures every single black market cigarette is possible. The best solution is to heavily regulate the industry and spread accurate information about cigarettes and I'd also personally ban cigarettes in movies under a certain age rating unless essential to the character in some way such as they develop cancer later in the movie or something.
I think a larger more unnoticed social harm is the damage it does to single payer/socialized medicine. When you only have one insurance pool every person receiving healthcare related to smoking is funding that could have gone to treating diseases that aren't as easily preventable.
The same goes for things like diabetes, which is absolutely destroying medicare. Right now one out of every three medicare dollars are being used to treat a completely preventable disease for the vast majority of those inflicted with it.
I think that if you want to smoke or drink tons of soda, that's fine. But we shouldn't be lessening the scope of healthcare coverage for other people just because of your bad habits. Either the industry making the money needs to subsidize the healthcare cost of their consumers, or the consumers themselves need to do it.
At least over here, taxation on cigarettes offsets the direct cost caused by smoking according to experts. That's why I left it out, I do believe you're allowed to be stupid and smoke. But keep the damage to yourself and make sure non-smokers aren't paying for it one way or another.
So yeah your demand is at least partially already reality over here.
"taxation on cigarettes offsets the direct cost caused by smoking".
By about 25 percent. I calculated it a few years back combining the total US taxes on tobacco (state, federal and local) and comparing it to the Medicare expenditures on treating the percentage of lung cancer caused by tobacco smoking. This is actually pretty skewed against my claims since tobacco isn't always smoked so the tax from smoking is smaller than the total tobacco tax revenue, Medicare only pays for a portion of the lung cancer treatments (since not everyone uses Medicare but the private insurance data isn't as available), and this is only one albeit expensive aliment caused by tobacco smoking. So 25 percent is a generous estimate.
Long story short "sin taxes" don't actually pay for anything, it's a complete myth mostly promoted by people who want to use the product.
I thought smokers ended up being cheaper for healthcare in the long run because they don't live as long?
Smokers on average don't die that much younger. But they do have a much less healthy end of life.
Women: don't smoke, but if you do, never stop.
/s for good measure
For private healthcare maybe? A lot of the reasons private insurance groups are even somewhat functional is because the vast majority of healthcare cost are shifted over to medicare once people start falling apart.
Most things like cardiovascular disease and lung cancer happen in the late 50s or older. People who aren't yet old enough for medicare will file for disability to access it earlier in the event of severe illnesses.
I'm fairly sure cig smokers are a net gain on the Exchequer
That becomes ammo against single payer, then. "If we get socialist medicine, they'll bring back prohibition!"
For-Profit healthcare is the scam here, not people drinking or smoking "too much," whatever that means to you personally.
"the overall societal cost is high"
Just like every other drug. Everyone wants to legalise marijuana, ostensibly for the tax money (but not really), and yet it has far greater social costs than tax will recover. Even the states that legalise it (and consequently becoming tourist destinations) are not actually benefiting from it even though the "Las Vegas effect" means that they should disproportionately benefit from it.
What are the "far greater social costs" of cannabis compared to tobacco?
So the fact that we already have one awful policy (legal tobacco) is not sufficient to justify implementing another one. Marijuana seems to have roughly the same or slightly lower impact on lung cancer as tobacco (hard to measure since most people smoke both). Of course it has other harder to measure effects like long-term brain damage, and DUI risk, or even loss of economic productivity and workplace accidents.
The US (and most of the world) has been triumphantly marching towards banning smoking and yet we seem to be normalising the use of another substance that isn't any better. It seems likely that we will be in the same place with marijuana in a few decades as we are with tobacco.
Edit: I realise that you may have not read my connected comment. Taxing tobacco doesn't make the government money, lung cancer from tobacco smoking directly costs Medicare 4x the total tax revenue from all tobacco products. So that is my basis for "taxing legal tobacco is a poor policy" and by extension marijuana will be as well.
Shittest high ever. Only people already hooked would be interested and they could buy it legally anyway.
I got my first cig from a black market dealer. In my country black market dealers have popped up to get around taxes on cheaper foriegn cigs
For some. Some would ultimately quit and some would never start.
There can be some significant downside to a black market though. De-regulation could pose additional health risks to users as the product may be exposed to unknown and untested chemicals. Not to mention the additional violence and related crimes that always seem to accompany a black market. Prohibition didn't work for alcohol. Prohibition isn't working for Weed. Why do we think it will work for nicotine?
I think a big part of the difference is that most people get addicted to cigarettes just by being around it, rather than seeking it out. Cigarettes don't get you high/drunk (well OK, you get a small buzz early on, but nothing like weed or alcohol).
People will seek out weed even when it's illegal because the risk is worth the reward (to them), because it comes with an intense high you can't really get anywhere else. I don't see nearly as many people seeking out cigarettes in the same way, unless they're already hooked.
I don't think it will "solve" the cigarette problem, but I do think that prohibition for cigarettes won't go quite the same route as prohibition for weed and alcohol.
Now, whether I want the government to be able to ban recreational substances just because they think it's bad (or use that as an excuse) is another question
I don't think you've seen how many high schoolers have a crippling nicotine addiction already
I got my first cigarette from a black market dealer. Cig prohibition will go the exact same way.
you can make it illegal to sell and only a fine for getting caught. Major retailers won't do it, cornershops("/bodegas" for the US) that sell under the counter will do it until they get caught, new ones won't bother because they want their business to be a success, and honestly, probably make more money on chewing gum than black market fags
nicotine high isn't worth the effort to a dealer to sell if you're used to selling fent, coke, weed, triple sod, clarky cat etc
gone within a generation. if you really want it, go to France, smuggle it. it's probably not worth it.
Mostly just the New York City area. In the Boston area they're "packies" (not an ethnic slur -- it's "package store") and most of the rest of the country it's a "convenience store" or "corner store".
Black market cigarettes is a very real thing actually.
fair comment but so is black market everything — from heroin to beanie babies.
Yea and the black market is one of the main reason things are harmful. 1 they r unregulated so your getting God knows what 2 they're most likely connected to gangs or your countries version of them so ur prolly funding then and 3 it creates a stigma around the drug causing addicts to be less likely to seek out help
right but people still murder, even though murder is illegal
no one thinks that murder should be legal (except for the guys from Alfred Hitchcock's Rope)
Drugs are a personal vice which the person can do without ever harming another person. Murder is murder. I don't think it should be legal for drug addicts to steal for their drugs, even tho some will whether or not its legal because that involves harming another person.
Except we have cleaner alternatives in the form of vaping. This isn't like prohibition where all alcoholic beverages were banned, or like drug prohibition where all narcotics and hallucinogens are only accessible for medical need.
If you need nicotine, you can still buy it. Just not in cigarette form.