TIL: the smoking age was raised to 21
(media.scored.co)
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You can die for your government, but they won't let you buy cigarettes or beer.
Amazing.
Like most disgusting vices, if you don't pick this garbage up until later in life, you tend not to pick it up at all.
I'm very libertarian on most things, but goddamnit will I put on my brown shirt and baby stomping boots to enforce the utter destruction of drugs and alcohol consumption in the world. Stop getting drunk and high, you fuckwads.
Alcohol for chemistry and medicine only. Tobacco plant extracts for medicine only. Cannabinoid extracts for medicine only. So on and so forth.
How is that supposed to work? We already tried the prohibition of alcohol. Just give the government more power next time?
Australia increases the taxation on cigarettes regularly. It is about AU$40 a packet or so, depending on the brand. That works out to about $1 a cigarette.
All cigarettes are in the same coloured brown packets with regulations on the markings and font on the outside. All the packets and all the cigarettes look the same.
The Australian Taxpayer has to pay for end of life medical care. The government just keeps raising the tax to pay for the two years of cancer treatment and/or heart failure treatment for smokers. The high taxes on cigarettes just about covers the direct costs now.
The opportunity cost of smoking is really high. People roll their own tobacco (which is slightly cheaper, especially if they roll them very thin) or they quit.
I can imagine that it would be a lot harder to enact this strategy in countries that did not have such effective border control.
I have yet to see data that supports a net cost to the government/society for treating smoking related illnesses.
The Google says that smokers live 13 years less on average, which is 13 years less pension, Social Security, etc. Even assuming several years of end of life treatment, had these individuals not smoked, they likely also would have developed one of the numerous old age illnesses a few years later that are also expensive to treat.
Excessive taxation on tobacco is more the government's response to a price inelastic item. Simply put, they know they can tax the shit out of it and people will still buy it. In fact, if everyone stoped smoking it would jack up the government's budget pretty badly. Just look at places that have high gas taxes to fund roads- now that people are switching to electrics and hybrids they're buying a lot less gas and so the government is scrambling to find new ways to pay for it.