Is that meant as a sort of joking, the smoking causes the cancer thing? I mean, yes, we all know smoking causes cancer, that isn’t being debated. It is more about the effect of taxation on rates of smoking and this type of strategy seems to have the effect of driving black market tobacco, not reducing smoking.
Yeah, so it makes me think that more people are professing to quit or their data on sales shows a reduction but it is more likely just a shift to untaxed tobacco.
Yeah, it is insane. My partner used a vape to quit and it was actually useful. I titrated the nicotine level down by 10% per refill, usually taking about a fortnight to get through. The use level would increase for the first few days but drop back down by the next refill. By the end when we dropped all the way to zero there was so little nicotine it wasn’t really noticeable. After that it was just the behavioural habit and that dropped by itself after a few months.
Compared with nicotine gum and patches it was way more effective and really did result in a long term quit. They are now approaching 10 years quit and it was absolutely worth doing. Harm reduction would suggest using vapes to help people quit and honestly to replace smoking all together.
In my opinion if it was just a crop like zucchini and you just had to meet agricultural standards, manage exposure to things like e. coli, get the product tested occasionally for heavy metals, and so on, it would be much better. Making it illegal doesn’t work, regulating it out of existence doesn’t work, but dealing with the harms from the other end, setting up programs for getting people off addictive things and using the health system etc, seems much better. I really think getting rid of the control and access these massive tobacco companies have and which was built directly off slavery and genocide would be a good idea.
The price for a 20 packet of cigarettes here in Australia is around $42 in AU dollars, so about $29. The production price is closer to $5, or about $4 USD. All the rest of that is taxes and that means you as a black market producer can make something for $5 and sell it for $30 and make $25 in profit, or you can sell way more at $20 or $15 and still make massive amounts of profit. You could kill the cartels and gangs tomorrow by dropping the tax and it would reduce the market for illegal tobacco to zero. The fact that our government don’t is a good indicator that they don’t actually care.
So this sounds like a good idea and I was a big supporter of it when the prices here in Australia went up, but I was wrong. We increased the prices with the thought that this would reduce uptake for young people and increase quitting or at least reduce use in older people. Instead we ended up creating a black market for untaxed tobacco. Since then we have had a massive increase in the level of gang activity. This means a fair few young people getting involved with these gangs and ending up committing crimes and going through the “justice” system. We have had drive by shootings, stabbings, abductions, and recently a mistaken abduction of the wrong person resulting in his dismemberment and death.
Increasing the price a little can have an impact but once you cross a threshold the criminal side becomes much more attractive and things become dire. The increase in people quitting may be because people have quit smoking, and I sincerely hope that is it, but in my opinion it is likely a significant portion of the change is a reduction of legal tobacco use and an increase in black market tobacco use.
Down here in Australia we constantly have people walking around with thongs (flip flops) or barefoot and in swimwear, so bikini top for women and bare for men. Honestly I don’t see a problem with it, I walk around with very minimal shoes now and I used to walk around barefoot most of the time when I was a kid. If you aren’t walking on a road with tonnes of broken glass and no footpaths then you are fine. As for people who complain about women having their chest exposed honestly, learn to not stare. It isn’t the job of women to cover up so you don’t have to put in effort.
Our beach culture is great because it is so laid back. If I had a business near the beach I would assume my customers would be barefoot and topless and make appropriate accommodations including somewhere to clean their feet off and taking care to keep the floor from being sticky. When I lived in the UK I found the constant demand to wear shoes stifling and awful and the USA felt really judgemental and gross.
There are a few options for age verification, but the one I like best is at the ISP/device level. You make the account at the ISP level have a flag for being a kid friendly service. You could also have the government establish simple tools for parents to install on their kids devices which would limit other apps and services, for example by blocking porn or violent age inappropriate content. You could even have it tie in with the age advice for film classification, though the current classification guidelines are pretty horrible. All of that could be handled by a very small government team and could be deliverable in 6 months.
These are active steps a parent can take to limit their child’s exposure to the internet and do not come with added cost to the parent. They would be just as available for someone who is poor as for someone who is rich. It would be possible to protect kids from many of the more dangerous aspects of the internet while also leaving unmanaged devices free and clear, preserving the good things about the open internet.