this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Tobacco is a shitty drug. We should ban it entirely and federally legalize another drug like cannabis instead.
I’m all for legalising cannabis, but to ban tobacco seems pointless.
I want to legalise or decriminalise drugs because it doesn’t work. Banning tobacco also will not work.
Tax high - use money for education and healthcare.
Ah yes. The poorest people are the smokers, let’s just make them more miserable. Sounds about right.
You should work at a place that sells cigarettes for awhile and scope out the customers. I’ve seen people count pennies and cry because they’re hungry but they’d rather not experience the anxiety of nicotine withdrawal.
As a former very poor person and now just regular poor person who used to smoke ikr.
That said, smoking never made me a happier person and at some point we have to do something. Smoking related issues cost the NHS an absolute fortune.
Do I think that corporations and billionaires should pay their fair share so us peasants don’t need to pay at all. Sure do.
Do I think that’ll ever happen. Heck no.
So given that, then we need to do something.
You shouldn’t make assumptions about people!!
You can have a look at some places that implemented the policy you're putting forward to check if it works though, right?
Have a look at Australia & New Zealand. Taxed at around 65-70% respectively with intent to make cigarettes cost prohibitive
A summary of some outcomes following a decade or so of implementation of these policies:
All this while cost of living increases, rate of poverty increases. I mean not all of these things are solely attributable to periodic tobacco excise increases but it hasn't fixed a thing. The government got some more money to blow on some antiquated nuclear submarines to defend our massive island, surrounded by allied nations and thousands of miles from the nearest potential adversary. They'll be ready in about 20 years. Great to see the extra tax dollars at work!
Unless I’m mistaken but correlation isn’t causation. Meaning that an increase in tax revenue from cigarettes around the time some new subs were ordered doesn’t mean that one is paying for the other.
Is it unreasonable to make the assumption that the extra tax revenue in fact goes into public health to combat the effects of smoking on an aging population?
smoking for those abive 15 has dropped from 24% in 1991 to around 11% in 2019
although i will concede that this tax disproportionately impacts lower income people
The current excise policies were implemented around 2010, at which point the global decline was already well underway. As I mentioned originally, there has been no stage following implementation of the respective policies in which the decline in smoking accelerated. It has only slowed since that time, and in Australia is increasing as of 2023.
It's unreasonable to assume that allocations of tax contributed by smokers and tobacco companies is proportionately allocated to areas relevant to the stated intent of the tax policy. That just isn't a thing for really any tax policy in any government - there's no point at which the public health cost of using tobacco nationally is reconciled against the tax income from those products to see if things are evening out. They're entirely separate vectors that are unrelated.
Do you think these are magic words or something? The entire stated intent of the policy is to cause a correlation that is inverse to the one that's been observed since. Nowhere above did I say that tobacco excise causes the problems I mentioned - I responded to someone putting forward the idea that it is a viable solution to those same problems. ~~I have trouble considering your response to be in good faith, since I already disclaimed this in my original comment.~~ I'm sorry, I misread yours. I was just making a joke dude - it's just meant to be an example of how 1. government expenditures are fundamentally disconnected from the tax funding source and 2. the government having an excess in tax funding often doesn't result in them doing anything of significant benefit to anyone with it. Who are the subs meant to to protect us from, Indonesia? Wait, that's right, it was just to piss off our #1 trading partner
Actual quote
So no I don’t believe they’re magic words and I find your quote disingenuous.
Have a nice day and we can end this here. No hard feelings.
Hey I misunderstood you there and corrected my comment. Just in case you didn't see that. I thought you were referring to a correlation of increased tobacco usage not equalling a causation by the excise tax policies, given the sub thing was kinda completely aside from the central point of what I'm saying
Cause banning cannabis worked so well lol
Prohibition of any drug is stupid. Especially a damn plant.
Imagine looking at the war on drugs, prohibition in the US, etc then thinking "I think we should ban this drug that's already normalised and used by millions. Then nobody will use it and everything will be fine."
It. Doesn't. Work.
It especially wouldn't for something as addictive as nicotine and so trivially purchasable abroad and easy to import.
Tobacco is already dying. Just let it continue to run its course.
This is what I do not get. The effect is literally zero. You need to be addicted to even feel something, and then it is only not having withdrawal.
The effect is fucking awesome... The first couple of smokes. Then it's only effect is getting rid of the headache withdrawals cause.
What do those first couple of smokes feel like?
It's been awhile but kind of like being buzzed from alcohol but it only lasts like 20 minutes
If you've never been a smoker, maybe withhold your opinion on the effects?
Obviously smoking anything isn’t good for you, but tobacco on it’s own isn’t that bad; it’s all the chemicals added that make it so shitty.
However, unless you grow your own or know a farmer, good luck finding any pure tobacco.
Tobacco on its own will cause cancer. Note how pipe and cigar smokers get mouth cancers despite taking only pure tobacco
That is patently false. There is only one single risk factor for cancer generally that is bigger problem than smoking unprocessed tobacco - that is smoking processed tobacco. If you charted endemic cancer risk factors in order of risk, with smoking processed tobacco at the top, then smoking unprocessed/organic/raw tobacco would be about 5% away from the top. The next biggest risk factor would be obesity about halfway down the chart (close to smokeless tobacco products like dip, which has a higher specific risk for mouth cancers). Turns out lighting something on fire and inhaling the combusted free radicals is universally a terrible idea, who'd have thunk? Personally I'm amazed that this kind of misinformation still propagates, on Lemmy of all places, sixty years following the surgeon general's warning.