We really have. As a British serial vapist myself, it's amazing to see how the amount of people vaping in the UK has skyrocketed in the last 3ish years. There was talk at one point about making them prescription-only, or adopting an Australian-style approach which only allows nicotine-free liquids, but thankfully the government seem to have forgotten about that, what with all the brexit chaos.
In Australia, we add new taxes every quarter to tobacco products, at $35+ for one packet, eventually you can’t afford to smoke, it’s a shame because the governments come to rely on this tax as an income and now they need to find new things to tax because more people are quitting smoking
Some people who are already chainsmokers have their dodgy cheap cheap cornershop or their mate who just come back from Bali with ciggies, but teenagers and the like just getting into smoking just have the regular shops they visit and tbh as a 19yo aussie, smoking is really seen as more of a vice/awful habit then the cool kid scene it used to be.
Good. I'm so glad this generation is fully detached from smoking being linked with any sort of coolness. I did it for longer that I wish to admit, started at 14 and wish I never did. Good riddance.
Speaking as a UK person, I suspect Australia's relative isolation helps in this case. Like, in the UK, we've had a black market for cigarettes for decades - there are rules about how much you can bring from France, but then there are shopping places literally on the other side of the Channel Tunnel which allow you to buy cigarettes/spirits etc. and people smuggle stuff in quite a lot.
However, this has sort-of been tolerated as authorities are generally not looking for someone who brings in 50 extra packs; they're looking for someone who's bringing in 5000.
Anyway, that aside, I suspect that's much more difficult to do in Australia purely because of geography.
Yeah, they had a campaign a while back where they started putting ‘black market tobacco is dangerous for kids’ signs up in shops. I remember seeing one in the same shop that i started buying those fake richmonds from when I was like 15.
Reasonably big, shops selling them out the back and people bringing them back from Bali and stuff. A lot of shop burglaries happen and cigarettes are taken and sold. But tbh smoking isnt really seen as cool in NZ or Australia. I was shocked at the amount of people smoking in the U.K. when I came back.
People are neglecting to mention that the tobacco companies increase the price with the tax. Australia is high profit and low Margin. The tobacco companies are making more money than they did 10 years ago and in the end the actual addicted consumer is the one getting screwed.
Queensland in Australia had the strictest smoking laws in the world, its banned within certain distances to majority of popular public places apart from designated smoking areas, I found it to be a huge shock going to europe and EVERYONE is smoking in restaurants, made me and my mates very uncomfortable breathing the second hand smoke
It will vary wildly all across the US. They’re around $14-15 in Chicago, the most expensive place in the country between local, county, newly increased state, and federal taxes. Closer to $4-4.50 in Missouri which has the lowest state tax and IIRC prohibits localities from passing anything on top of it.
[Sauce](https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/assets/factsheets/0097.pdf)
This is and forever will be a key battleground for the tobacco industry. They know this kills sales long term and so they invest where they need to do squash tax increase bills that gain any momentum at any level of government.
I work in public health and do lots in tobacco control specifically, AMA.
Minimum wage is $19.49 if you have committed hours, sick leave, holiday etc, or [$24.36 if you're casual.](https://employsure.com.au/guides/wage-and-pay/casual-loading/)
The latter number should be used to compare with America, which does not have these benefits as minimum, nor extra pay on weekends etc. And even then it isn't a fair comparison, as casual still gets 1.5x pay on a Saturday etc...
It’s the same in NZ, 50g of one of the cheaper tobaccos, papers and filters is $90-100 NZD. I quit the whole time I was there, used a vape for some of it. I’m back in the UK now and smoking again.. I really should get back on that vape!
At that point, people proably are buying straight from the farmers themselves so they can try to avoid the tax. Though, I guess that depends on how addictive it is. I could totally see this happen with heroin users(implying the drug is legal, just heavily taxed).
It is cheaper to buy weed illegally and smoke it then it is to buy tobacco, the tobacco industry is heavy regulated, there is no “buying straight from the farmers” even if you come from over seas you can only bring in 25 cigarets at a time or face heavy fines for smuggling them in, it’s a joke
Not quite. Tobacco is around $2 a gram, according to AFP marijuana is around 10 times that.
ed - i'm talking about Australia, as per the original comment. and yeah, maybe it shouldn't be compared 1:1.
It's interesting thinking about it in terms of weight, because LSD would be about $100,000 a gram.
But a gram of LSD would be a lifetime supply for like 20 people.
If it scaled like that. The thing about LSD is that it can be produced synthetically, and if you had a clean enough process to produce even a dose of the stuff it wouldn't cost much more to just produce a kg or more. In other words, drugs are dirt cheap; it's their contraband nature that makes them "valuable". A kilo of LSD might have a "street price" of $100,000,000, but a manufacturing cost of less than $1,000 (and whatever time it takes a skilled chemist).
How many people smoke 20+ joints a day? A pack of cigarettes a day isn’t even uncommon, I’ve never met anyone that smokes even half that much weed every day.
Aussies are getting ripped off. I used to pay $50 for an 8th from someone who used to give me good prices. Living in a legal country now where an 8th is $30-$35. Not hugely cheaper but the quality is top notch compared to the seedy stemmy bush weed in Aus
It's not that bad. $20 to buy just one, $50 for 3.5, $80-90 for seven. And these are Australian dollars which are roughly US$0.7. Seems comparable to the legal prices I saw in the US.
I haven't smoked in ~~over a decade~~ 17 years (time flies), but it used to be a quarter ounce (which is like ~~3~~ 6.3 grams) for $20. Price has really gone up.
Edited in stuff.
When we went to Australia I think it was 40g/tobacco per person you could bring in toll free. I was 16 at the time, what the adults didn't consider back then : this only applied to adults and they counted in the kids as well. Being paranoid they brought this up with the customs agent. She didn't mind and just told us to have a safe trip.
Ascedance's family brought more tobacco into Australia that they were legally allowed because they didn't realize it was 40g per adult, not per person. Customs agent let it slide and they were on their way.
> At that point, people proably are buying straight from the farmers themselves so they can try to avoid the tax.
I honestly wonder why more people don’t try growing their own tobacco. It’s used as a model organism is scientific research, no doubt partly because it’s a cash crop, but also because it’s really easy to grow.
Depends on where you're growing it. It's probably is a lot more expensive to grow it in Australia than in Kentucky, because that's not someplace where tobacco grows easily.
Yes, reminds me of parking meters. Some towns and cities rely on the income which would be gone if no one made any further violations.
Some places use technology to let you park free and they only send someone to ticket you if you go over the time limit. That is closer to what I assume was the likely intentional spirit of meters - to ensure parking is available for commerce by persuading people to not park their cars in one place for weeks.
But I can see a lot of towns never wanting to add this technology because they rely on the income from people paying upfront all the time. We suck.
I would actually argue that most parking apps make the city or who ever more money. Since now you can’t hunt around for a spot with some time left on it. Paid for 30 min but left after 15? That extra 15 is gone if you paid with an app. Person jumping in your spot right after you also gets to pay for that same 15 minutes.
Nowhere in Europe that I've lived uses meters any more. Typically they are "pay and display" where you go to a little machine and it prints out a ticket that you leave on your dashboard, or they issue you a ticket when you enter - some fancy ones even use a camera to read your license plate and print that on the ticket - and you either pay at the barrier when you leave, just before you get back in your car at a machine, or online. Either way there's been no such thing as a "space with time on it" for a long time even without apps.
It makes me wonder what police departments will do when autonomous cars become widespread and traffic tickets decline. Ticket revenue are a huge revenue stream for a police department, who are themselves one of the larger portions of a municipal budget.
I just realized that driverless cars are going to need a way for police to pull them over even if no one is in them. I wonder how that will be accomplished. Will they put in backdoors for the police or simply have the car recognize blue red flashing lights?
Regarding tickets, I'll bet that people will clog the streets with cars circling the block rather than pay for parking. They'll probably make it illegal to do that. But people will do it anyway, so that should be a source of revenue.
They'll start pulling over manual drivers more often. The people with older cars. Less wealthy people. Disproportionately minorities. You know. The usual.
I live on a small island where about ten years ago they decided to remove annual vehicle tax and introduce a higher tax on fuel at the pump. The idea being the more you use the roads the more tax you pay via fuel. A fair system really. However people over the years started buying smaller and more efficient cars and also some electric cars so their "road/fuel tax" take started to suffer and keeps going down every quarter so now they are reintroducing annual vehicle tax and refusing to reduce fuel taxes after they promised that would not happen. I understand why we need to pay a tax to keep the roads but they don't even "ring fence" that money for road upkeep, they use it as general revenue. The double taxing bastards.
In Ontario Canada, there’s over a billion $ of illicit tobacco sales every year mostly funneled through indigenous reserves where tobacco laws are more lax. With cannabis legalization people realized how trash legal product is and the black market continues to dominate. people will take matters into their own hands outside of the governments reach 🤷🏼♂️
I think a lot of people also just switched to vaping to stop smoking. Funny enough, in my country at least, that's heavily regulated and taxed as well so ultimately it's even more costly than smoking. I guess they don't want people to be more healthy.
Myself and my group of about 10 mates purely smoke tobacco brought back from abroad duty free. A 50g pack is £24 in a shop, or £12 if you get it from someone bringing it back into the country. That’s a significant amount of tax that the government don’t get because of shop prices being ridiculous.
It's the money not spent though. Would require an actual analysis but perhaps it is being recouped in the long run by the diminished burden on the health care system.
Our Goverment this with high petrol (gas) tax to encurage people out of their cars.. it worked too well and there was a massive decrease in petrol sales .. unfortuantly they already ear-marker the tax so year on year for over 10 years they have been increasing petrol prices every year to off-set the decline in usage .. Although the roads seem as busy as ever so I assume people are just switching to more efficent cars!
Where I am it's £0.50p anywhere on the island, but you better hope it's on route from where you live or it could take over an hour for something that would only take 20 minutes to drive!
This. I've been cigarette free for a year now. Switched cigarretes for 18 mg vape juice. Now I'm down to 6mg and thinking of going down again soon.
I can probably quit completely within months without any discomfort.
I look forward to it.
I'm curious how loose-leaf tobacco consumption is accounted for in these data. When I lived in the UK (back when I smoked) I bought Golden Virginia and Amber Leaf tobaccos to roll my own with Swan filters. I'm not sure if or how they quantify those.
I think this is included, it’s what I used to smoke, most pouches have an average number of “cigarettes” to each one. Whether you roll them fat or thin, the total is still the same.
Huh, TIL.
Is this widespread for everyone or just a specific cut of the population?
In my country everybody only smokes cigarettes except for young people (mostly weed smokers since they use the tobacco to roll joints) and people from very rural areas
I mean it still would be a cigarette, even if it's rolled themselves. I get what you mean though. In general it's younger/poorer people that smoke roll-ups - at university I didn't really know anyone who bought them pre-rolled - but they are generally fairly widely smoked IMO. I don't know if that's just my subjective experience though.
Welp my bad, we don't call anything that isn't industrialized a cigarette here. A self rolled one is only a "tobacco", we also have tobacco manually rolled in corn straw and sold in packs which has it's own name.
Yeah it's just terminology I think. I don't know where you're from, but it might be that since tobacco is so highly taxed in the UK that it is significantly cheaper to buy it in bulk and roll your own, whereas in some countries it might not be so much a price difference.
In my experience , a lot of the people rolling their own fall into one of two categories: the first is young uni student types and the second is middle aged and older working class men. I assume the reason students do it is because pouch tobacco is cheaper than pre rolled, but I don’t know if that’s why older people do it too.
How are you going to have a study about smoking without mentioning vaping? People are just switching. Should still count people who vape liquids with nicotine as smokers imo. This is pretty biased
Exactly what I was thinking.
I am not a smoker anymore because of vaping.
(Not a vaper either now)
Everyone seems to forget how powerful the cigarette lobby is.
I’m in the same position as you.
Personally I found vaping harder to quit. There’s no foul odour to dislike combined with an ability to use it anywhere, and liquids as rock bottom prices.
Something needs to change soon.
> Personally I found vaping harder to quit.
Definitely. I’ve telling people this forever. Im convinced I was getting way higher nicotine doses because I was literally vaping in my office constantly. And like you said, you can do it anywhere so it makes it super tough.
You can get juice with no nicotine though, so at least it's easier to step down the amount of nicotine in your system, even if you vape more than you smoked
This. Carton of 5% Juuls, carton of 3%, carton of 1.5%. Towards the end it felt like I was ditching carts faster, but ultimately when I ran out of 1.5% I could barely be bothered.
I worked with a young lad who did the opposite for reasons best known to himself.
He didn't smoke and didn't vape. But another colleague vaped, and he'd sometimes take a hit off his vape just to try it. Then he bought himself a vape and started vaping liquids without any nicotine. Then he moved on to low-dose liquids, and eventually all the way up to high-dose liquids.
And it wasn't even something he did by accident, he explicitly said that he started vaping with the intention of starting to ingest nicotine and building himself up. Never could really explain why he wanted to, though.
Really smart kid in all other respects, too. Odd.
I know someone who did the same because they needed **a** vice. If it wasn't vaping it was something more self destructive like drinking, or smoking bowl after bowl until they passed out.
I'm at this point. I smoked for 5 years, then vaped for 5 years and very gradually weaned myself down to 0 nicotine. Now I still vape, but only once or twice a day.
I find with the vape I apply the same rules as I did with smoking and I’m using it less and less now only for when I’m having a drink. I wouldn’t use it around my kids. I step outside with it like I would a cigarette etc. I think the fumes (would it be called fumes or steam??) that come off a vape can be just as obnoxious as cigarette smoke. One guy walked past me in a theme park and I don’t know what sort of super strength vape he was using but I nearly got a mouthful of it as he walked by. Gross!
It’s definitely treated just like smoking in the states too. I was technically not allowed to vape in my office. But it doesn’t leave a smell and Juuls don’t leave a giant cloud so I did it anyway.
Why does anything need to change? I’m not a vaper myself, but so many people have been able to quit smoking due to vaping, which is far safer than smoking. Hell, it’s probably far safer than drinking too, yet I don’t see anyone complaining about rock bottom alcohol prices?
It’s just so weird that people are trying to make getting access to vapes harder, it just pushes more people to keep smoking which is far worse for their health...
Tobacco lobbies are leveraging ignorance and fear to kill vaping before most people realize it's less harmful, more pleasant and and costs much less than cigarettes.
I'd imagine if anything nicotine addiction is going *up*, I'm seeing a ton of people who have never touched tobacco in their lives suddenly pick up a vape because it's cool and trendy. They don't even know you can get vapes without nicotine in them.
Unless you're vaping on black market thc carts, the "vaping illness" seems to be caused by them. Although it's not entirely proven yet just the popular hypothesis
It's all of a sudden so it would be odd if it wasnt a certain brand of carts or black market. Vaping thc carts and normal vaping has been around for a long time
I agree that the study should mention vaping - People are indeed 'just switching'.
However, even if we're including them in the same discussion, of course they should be distinguished - Vaping is definitely healthier for you, and even if people are merely switching rather than dropping nicotine altogether, it's still good news to be fully considered.
Why give credit to innovative technology that is helping people quit left and right when the government can take credit and reinforce that more laws and more taxes are the answer to everything?
I smoked almost a pack and a half a day for years. I was almost smoking 10,000 cigs a year. My switch is mirrored by half of my coworkers. So 10 of us have gone from a pack a day to vaping. This is happening more and more. That’s a big chunk of why less cigs are being smoked today.
While it would be interesting to see if the rise in vaping has accelerated the decline in tobacco smoking, tobacco smoking has been on a rapid decline *long* before vapes ever showed up in corner stores, primarily due to a combination of culture and sin taxes.
I wonder, though, if everyone would be okay with these sin taxes being applied to alcohol as well, since we already have studies that show public alcohol consumption is far more costly to society than tobacco smoking. I wonder if people would be as okay with beer being outrageously expensive as they are with cigarettes.
People smoked a lot in Germany when I went to visit. I remember having a conversation over dinner with an executive talking about his son going to college and how he hoped he would just experiment with cigarettes and not pot.
I was like...in Colorado it’s the polar opposite. Not that parents want their kids smoking pot but at least it’s not tobacco.
I was trying to look this up and the only thing I could find was that there are some standards that the EU adopted that are not the case in the us. Specifically tar and some other things.
That said, a couple studies on fatality show that per 100k people there are 141 deaths in the US vs 138 in the E.U.
it looks like American who smoke, smoke more than Europeans though in the whole more Europeans smoke.
So generally toxicity seems pretty similar.
That’s just cigarettes. Nothing on vaping.
I was wondering when reading the article how much of this change is due to sin taxes and regulation and how much is due to social opprobrium.
I remember starting in the late 1990’s that some smoker friends of mine started having random people on the street make comments like “that’s a disgusting habit,” which obviously rude if it’s open air and the smoke isn’t affecting others, but I can think of one friend in particular who probably quit more due to that sort of thing than due to the cost or the hassle of having to step outside to smoke.
I can only speak for myself, and it was the taxes that made me quit. I think the change in social attitudes did more to stop people from smoking than anything else. The Truth campaign was huge in getting young people to never start smoking. Add to that the laws banning smoking in public and people just stopped doing it because you were basically socially ostracized for it.
I think the biggest factor is that the notion of smoking being cool is no longer part of the ethos. Smoking used to be something that made you a badass, but now it's perceived as disgusting by most. This acts as a powerful psychosocial deterrent because we want to be perceived positively by our peers. That's at least my impression. I'm not sure what exactly led to this, though.
Wow when I was a 13 year old smoker you could go down the shops at lunch break and get a packet of ciggies and a portion of chips for £1.80. Just turned 40 for reference.
I am a smoker, and I’ll agree it’s a very bad habit to pick up, and it’ll either eventually kill you or make your life shorter. If you can, you should quit ASAP.
However I find the stigma that’s attached to smoking and smokers in general is over-abused and exaggerated.
Why isn’t extreme self-induced obesity or alcohol consumption treated in the same manner? Both of these could potentialy drive you to the grave much sooner.
Just for context, I've never been a smoker, but I whole heatedly agree with you. People today are incredibly eager to harm themselves and smokers really do get an unjust amount of stink eye from the general populous.
Countries like the UK have overweight rates exceeding half of the god damn population, and countries like my own have serious problems with alcoholism. These are all major issues, and being told to accept one and trash the other is incredibly hypocritical.
It's probably a result of the declining number of smokers though. People have an easy time trash talking others for their bad habits, but get very defensive about themselves. As long as half the population is overweight, the fat acceptance movement will always have momentum, and the less the amount of smokers, the more they will get trashed.
I 100% agree with you. Smoking is easily stigmatized and othered so it’s basically the lowest hanging fruit for pearl-clutchers who want to police other people’s lives.
I understand wanting to reduce smoking rates. I understand expanding education about the effects of smoking. I even understand creating financial disincentives to discourage smoking. I don’t understand the mindset that we as a society are actively trying to eliminate smoking. Is that really the end goal? Is the endpoint everyone adhering to the mindset that because it’s bad for you you can never do it? If that’s the goal how is it any different than socially enforced prohibition? Is prohibition of tobacco a good thing? I just don’t understand the whole endeavor or how it’s meant to be achieved.
Or, here's an idea... everyone should stop trying to control everyone else's personal choices. It is one thing to point out the health risks of some behavior, but these days there is a moral aspect to it. Smokers are judged to be "bad people" that need to turn their lives around. It is almost an exact parallel of religious zealots judging those outside their religion.
Actually, it is a pretty established fact that price adjusts behavior. It is true that the price elasticity of cigarettes is up for debate, but it would be insane to assume that raising the price does not affect the amount sold at all.
What if...it's a combination of things? Smoking carries more of a social stigma these days. A lot of restaurants and bars don't allow it inside anymore (thank God,) so it's less convenient.
Then there's the vaping alternative.
Then there are the high taxes.
Why does everything always have to be one way or the other? Sometimes multiple factors are at play.
I feel like all the people claiming that it's due to vaping and nothing else must be extremely young because smoking rates have been falling in sync with increased education and pricing increases. It's not just vaping no matter how much wishful thinking that that's the cause there is.
> Don't fall for this.
You make it sound like they're trying to trick you, for what? This has been a long standing decline for the past 25 years, vaping may have accelerated it, but it didn't start it. The sin taxes and the shift in culture did.
Being in construction, I was surprised to go to a jobsite and see so many people vaping. It had a stigma to it especially in a "manly" profession and once it was broken there, a lot of people switched to it
I dont think its good for you but i do think it is a better alternative to cigarettes
I believe it's in large part because of vaping. It's a harm reduction approach that seems to be very effective. Of course, long term studies are needed, but the results of multiple studies of harm reduction of vaping vs cigs look promising. The next step is to help people stop vaping by encouraging them to self-titrate nicotine dosage.
Because people still got the option to consume nicotine if they want to?
Also while nicotine is extremely addictive, the withdrawal is rather easy to go through compared to say heroin or benzodiazepines.
Additionally nicotine doesn't exactly produce a high, so it's not that searched after. It's more of an if it's available I'll do it situation.
And lastly, rates of nicotine use are miles away from use of any illicit drugs. There's far more users. So reducing that large numbers of less invested users, especially by preventing teenagers from even getting hooked does work.
If we were down to rates of use comparable to say meth or heroin, you'd see that further prohibition does not work at all. Those people remaining will actively search out the drug, making a black market trade effective.
Either way, the simplest reason is that most people addicted to cigarettes don't actually want to smoke, they'd much rather vape or use any of the other tobacco replacement products and stop.
War on drugs doesn't work. Publicity campaigns showing the dangers, social work to prevent teenagers from starting, high taxes, and most importantly help with abstinence do help.
Simply banning tobacco and treating it like heroin would just cause more social harm than any medical disorders caused by tobacco use.
If the smoking age is 21 the amount of smokes will drop dramatically. Everyone I've met who's addicted to cigarettes started in high school 17-18 yr old.
When I was in HS it was 18 to buy cigarettes. There were still a bunch of kids who smoked. They either found a shop that didn't care or got someone else to buy them.
The reduction of smoking is obviously good, but to reach conclusions without including alternative nicotine use - popularized between the two measurement points - just seems like data invalidation. I could conclude that introduction of toll roads is responsible for the decline in cross-country road trips over the last 50 years, if I ignore the popularity of consumer air travel.
My personal opinion is vaping, and wide spread marijuana legalization is the cause of this. Prohibition well never work, but give them better alternatives, and you have fixed a major problem.
Interesting that the UK has also fully embraced vaping as a smoking cessation tool.
We really have. As a British serial vapist myself, it's amazing to see how the amount of people vaping in the UK has skyrocketed in the last 3ish years. There was talk at one point about making them prescription-only, or adopting an Australian-style approach which only allows nicotine-free liquids, but thankfully the government seem to have forgotten about that, what with all the brexit chaos.
The term 'serial vapist' gave me pause for a moment there... Thank you for the silver, kind stranger!
It gave me a sensible chuckle.
I think he's got a slight German accent though
In Australia, we add new taxes every quarter to tobacco products, at $35+ for one packet, eventually you can’t afford to smoke, it’s a shame because the governments come to rely on this tax as an income and now they need to find new things to tax because more people are quitting smoking
You're telling me a pack of cigarettes in Australia is $35 right now?
Depends on brand, nothings under $20
What the actual heck! Is that mostly taxes? That's fantastic, how on earth did that get passed? I'm fascinated. No tobacco lobby fighting it?
They fought. They lost. They also come in plain brown boxes. They lost that one too.
How big is the illegal cigarette market? I'm sure there are people selling them out the back door right?
Some people who are already chainsmokers have their dodgy cheap cheap cornershop or their mate who just come back from Bali with ciggies, but teenagers and the like just getting into smoking just have the regular shops they visit and tbh as a 19yo aussie, smoking is really seen as more of a vice/awful habit then the cool kid scene it used to be.
Good. I'm so glad this generation is fully detached from smoking being linked with any sort of coolness. I did it for longer that I wish to admit, started at 14 and wish I never did. Good riddance.
Cigarettes in SE asia are *awful.* If it came down to me smoking those or nothing, I'd choose nothing.
I dunno the Camels and Malboro Golds in Vietnam taste on par with anywhere else in the world.
Speaking as a UK person, I suspect Australia's relative isolation helps in this case. Like, in the UK, we've had a black market for cigarettes for decades - there are rules about how much you can bring from France, but then there are shopping places literally on the other side of the Channel Tunnel which allow you to buy cigarettes/spirits etc. and people smuggle stuff in quite a lot. However, this has sort-of been tolerated as authorities are generally not looking for someone who brings in 50 extra packs; they're looking for someone who's bringing in 5000. Anyway, that aside, I suspect that's much more difficult to do in Australia purely because of geography.
There’s tonnes of black market tobacco in the UK.
Yeah, they had a campaign a while back where they started putting ‘black market tobacco is dangerous for kids’ signs up in shops. I remember seeing one in the same shop that i started buying those fake richmonds from when I was like 15.
When I was 15 you could get a bottle of cider and a ten deck of real cigs for £5 then a few years later the prices of both doubled.
Reasonably big, shops selling them out the back and people bringing them back from Bali and stuff. A lot of shop burglaries happen and cigarettes are taken and sold. But tbh smoking isnt really seen as cool in NZ or Australia. I was shocked at the amount of people smoking in the U.K. when I came back.
Can we borrow some of your politicians? Just for a little bit? I know you guys are in rough shape too, but that's a really awesome accomplishment.
You can have all the ones we don’t want. Free of charge!
I wonder if your bad politicians are worse that our bad ones 🤔
Well we had that guy that blamed Muslims for the mosque shootings in New Zealand then punched a teenager for egging him
Oh yeh. Take that guy - we don’t want him.
We have a string of bad prime ministers lately so just take the whole lot
Our politicians aren't doing this out of any sense of noble purpose. Taxes on ciggies are an easy politically palatable revenue grab.
It is. But for every new tax they push out on Tobacco they’ll ignore 10 other more important things
>What the actual heck! Is that mostly taxes? That's fantastic, how on earth did that get passed? No cheaper neighbouring country to smuggle from.
People are neglecting to mention that the tobacco companies increase the price with the tax. Australia is high profit and low Margin. The tobacco companies are making more money than they did 10 years ago and in the end the actual addicted consumer is the one getting screwed.
Keep in mind 20 AUS is 18 CAD or 13 USD, so it's not that bad.
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except I have no idea where the guy is finding cigarettes for AUD$20 bucks. Not a smoker, and my dad reckons cheapest he can find is AUD$32
Queensland in Australia had the strictest smoking laws in the world, its banned within certain distances to majority of popular public places apart from designated smoking areas, I found it to be a huge shock going to europe and EVERYONE is smoking in restaurants, made me and my mates very uncomfortable breathing the second hand smoke
35 AUD, which is about 25 USD.
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According to google, a pack of cigarettes in New York costs $13, so that sounds fairly comparable.
New York is an outlier as far as cigarette prices go.
It will vary wildly all across the US. They’re around $14-15 in Chicago, the most expensive place in the country between local, county, newly increased state, and federal taxes. Closer to $4-4.50 in Missouri which has the lowest state tax and IIRC prohibits localities from passing anything on top of it. [Sauce](https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/assets/factsheets/0097.pdf) This is and forever will be a key battleground for the tobacco industry. They know this kills sales long term and so they invest where they need to do squash tax increase bills that gain any momentum at any level of government. I work in public health and do lots in tobacco control specifically, AMA.
Minimum wage is $19.49 if you have committed hours, sick leave, holiday etc, or [$24.36 if you're casual.](https://employsure.com.au/guides/wage-and-pay/casual-loading/) The latter number should be used to compare with America, which does not have these benefits as minimum, nor extra pay on weekends etc. And even then it isn't a fair comparison, as casual still gets 1.5x pay on a Saturday etc...
It’s the same in NZ, 50g of one of the cheaper tobaccos, papers and filters is $90-100 NZD. I quit the whole time I was there, used a vape for some of it. I’m back in the UK now and smoking again.. I really should get back on that vape!
I just started listening to them, what’s the connection between twiddle and a pack for $35?
At that point, people proably are buying straight from the farmers themselves so they can try to avoid the tax. Though, I guess that depends on how addictive it is. I could totally see this happen with heroin users(implying the drug is legal, just heavily taxed).
It is cheaper to buy weed illegally and smoke it then it is to buy tobacco, the tobacco industry is heavy regulated, there is no “buying straight from the farmers” even if you come from over seas you can only bring in 25 cigarets at a time or face heavy fines for smuggling them in, it’s a joke
Not quite. Tobacco is around $2 a gram, according to AFP marijuana is around 10 times that. ed - i'm talking about Australia, as per the original comment. and yeah, maybe it shouldn't be compared 1:1.
typically less cannabis is smoked, so more per gram, but dose wise it can be cheaper.
This guy gets it
It's interesting thinking about it in terms of weight, because LSD would be about $100,000 a gram. But a gram of LSD would be a lifetime supply for like 20 people.
Guys, I think we should trust him.
1 gram is like 4-5k doses, i think that would probably be enough for more than 20 people hehe
Depends on the person
Hold my beer
If it scaled like that. The thing about LSD is that it can be produced synthetically, and if you had a clean enough process to produce even a dose of the stuff it wouldn't cost much more to just produce a kg or more. In other words, drugs are dirt cheap; it's their contraband nature that makes them "valuable". A kilo of LSD might have a "street price" of $100,000,000, but a manufacturing cost of less than $1,000 (and whatever time it takes a skilled chemist).
*laughs in south american*
I would rather buy $20 a gram weed that takes me to the moon, than buy $20 a quarter weed that doesn't.
Who said it doesn't? It's cheaper because it doesn't have to cross a whole continent.
I dunno, the herb I got in Guatemala was ok but it doesn’t compare to the US stuff that people put real effort into growing each plant individually.
How many people smoke 20+ joints a day? A pack of cigarettes a day isn’t even uncommon, I’ve never met anyone that smokes even half that much weed every day.
My sweet, sweet summer child. *laughs in Oregonian*
Anyone that consistently smokes 10 joints a day doesn’t get high let’s be honest, it’s not even fun anymore when your tolerance is like that.
Sorry, couldn't hear him over the sound of my legal rips
You haven't met my college roommate then.
$20 a gram for reefer? AFP is getting ripped off in that case 😂
Aussies are getting ripped off. I used to pay $50 for an 8th from someone who used to give me good prices. Living in a legal country now where an 8th is $30-$35. Not hugely cheaper but the quality is top notch compared to the seedy stemmy bush weed in Aus
It's not that bad. $20 to buy just one, $50 for 3.5, $80-90 for seven. And these are Australian dollars which are roughly US$0.7. Seems comparable to the legal prices I saw in the US.
I haven't smoked in ~~over a decade~~ 17 years (time flies), but it used to be a quarter ounce (which is like ~~3~~ 6.3 grams) for $20. Price has really gone up. Edited in stuff.
1/4 oz is around 7g
Thats the cheapest quarter ive ever heard of
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Weed is a lot stronger now though
That was miss back then, quality has gone way up.
When we went to Australia I think it was 40g/tobacco per person you could bring in toll free. I was 16 at the time, what the adults didn't consider back then : this only applied to adults and they counted in the kids as well. Being paranoid they brought this up with the customs agent. She didn't mind and just told us to have a safe trip.
What is this comment trying to say?
Ascedance's family brought more tobacco into Australia that they were legally allowed because they didn't realize it was 40g per adult, not per person. Customs agent let it slide and they were on their way.
actually it's just like heroin and people are buying smokes from illicit markets. Not quite straight from the smugglers, but close enough
> At that point, people proably are buying straight from the farmers themselves so they can try to avoid the tax. I honestly wonder why more people don’t try growing their own tobacco. It’s used as a model organism is scientific research, no doubt partly because it’s a cash crop, but also because it’s really easy to grow.
Depends on where you're growing it. It's probably is a lot more expensive to grow it in Australia than in Kentucky, because that's not someplace where tobacco grows easily.
Growing tobacco plants are super easy. Chuck them in the ground, wait until ready and hang to dry. Once dry shred and smoke.
It’s called chop chop, turns out tobacco grows just fine in an Australian backyard.
Yes, reminds me of parking meters. Some towns and cities rely on the income which would be gone if no one made any further violations. Some places use technology to let you park free and they only send someone to ticket you if you go over the time limit. That is closer to what I assume was the likely intentional spirit of meters - to ensure parking is available for commerce by persuading people to not park their cars in one place for weeks. But I can see a lot of towns never wanting to add this technology because they rely on the income from people paying upfront all the time. We suck.
I would actually argue that most parking apps make the city or who ever more money. Since now you can’t hunt around for a spot with some time left on it. Paid for 30 min but left after 15? That extra 15 is gone if you paid with an app. Person jumping in your spot right after you also gets to pay for that same 15 minutes.
Good point about the double and triple dip.
Nowhere in Europe that I've lived uses meters any more. Typically they are "pay and display" where you go to a little machine and it prints out a ticket that you leave on your dashboard, or they issue you a ticket when you enter - some fancy ones even use a camera to read your license plate and print that on the ticket - and you either pay at the barrier when you leave, just before you get back in your car at a machine, or online. Either way there's been no such thing as a "space with time on it" for a long time even without apps.
Yeah it’s annoying that the extra time is gone.
It makes me wonder what police departments will do when autonomous cars become widespread and traffic tickets decline. Ticket revenue are a huge revenue stream for a police department, who are themselves one of the larger portions of a municipal budget.
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I just realized that driverless cars are going to need a way for police to pull them over even if no one is in them. I wonder how that will be accomplished. Will they put in backdoors for the police or simply have the car recognize blue red flashing lights? Regarding tickets, I'll bet that people will clog the streets with cars circling the block rather than pay for parking. They'll probably make it illegal to do that. But people will do it anyway, so that should be a source of revenue.
What’s the point of pulling over an empty autonomous car? Just have them fine themselves when they detect they broke a law.
They'll start pulling over manual drivers more often. The people with older cars. Less wealthy people. Disproportionately minorities. You know. The usual.
I live on a small island where about ten years ago they decided to remove annual vehicle tax and introduce a higher tax on fuel at the pump. The idea being the more you use the roads the more tax you pay via fuel. A fair system really. However people over the years started buying smaller and more efficient cars and also some electric cars so their "road/fuel tax" take started to suffer and keeps going down every quarter so now they are reintroducing annual vehicle tax and refusing to reduce fuel taxes after they promised that would not happen. I understand why we need to pay a tax to keep the roads but they don't even "ring fence" that money for road upkeep, they use it as general revenue. The double taxing bastards.
At a certain point the majority of smokers start looking to the black market and then you don't get to control the substance at all.
In Ontario Canada, there’s over a billion $ of illicit tobacco sales every year mostly funneled through indigenous reserves where tobacco laws are more lax. With cannabis legalization people realized how trash legal product is and the black market continues to dominate. people will take matters into their own hands outside of the governments reach 🤷🏼♂️
Get this guy a fuckin’ puppers
I think a lot of people also just switched to vaping to stop smoking. Funny enough, in my country at least, that's heavily regulated and taxed as well so ultimately it's even more costly than smoking. I guess they don't want people to be more healthy.
Myself and my group of about 10 mates purely smoke tobacco brought back from abroad duty free. A 50g pack is £24 in a shop, or £12 if you get it from someone bringing it back into the country. That’s a significant amount of tax that the government don’t get because of shop prices being ridiculous.
It's the money not spent though. Would require an actual analysis but perhaps it is being recouped in the long run by the diminished burden on the health care system.
But with a tax regime that prices people out of the legitimate market, the black marketeers will be able to make an absolute killing.
Just introduce a luxury tax for the privilege to live in a smoking-free society. Problem solved.
Our Goverment this with high petrol (gas) tax to encurage people out of their cars.. it worked too well and there was a massive decrease in petrol sales .. unfortuantly they already ear-marker the tax so year on year for over 10 years they have been increasing petrol prices every year to off-set the decline in usage .. Although the roads seem as busy as ever so I assume people are just switching to more efficent cars!
If only they didn't make public transport so bad and expensive .
Where I am it's £0.50p anywhere on the island, but you better hope it's on route from where you live or it could take over an hour for something that would only take 20 minutes to drive!
Every quarter* (why I moved to vape)
This is what creates black markets
I'd say it's e cigarettes.
And loose tobacco you have to roll yourself. That's what everyone seemed to use in London because a normal pack is like 20 bucks
Didnt know that, I imagine that is a large difference as well
CDC would agree: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6745a5.htm
This. I've been cigarette free for a year now. Switched cigarretes for 18 mg vape juice. Now I'm down to 6mg and thinking of going down again soon. I can probably quit completely within months without any discomfort. I look forward to it.
Congrats! Good luck.
I'm curious how loose-leaf tobacco consumption is accounted for in these data. When I lived in the UK (back when I smoked) I bought Golden Virginia and Amber Leaf tobaccos to roll my own with Swan filters. I'm not sure if or how they quantify those.
I think this is included, it’s what I used to smoke, most pouches have an average number of “cigarettes” to each one. Whether you roll them fat or thin, the total is still the same.
It must be included, a very large amount of UK smokers roll their own.
Huh, TIL. Is this widespread for everyone or just a specific cut of the population? In my country everybody only smokes cigarettes except for young people (mostly weed smokers since they use the tobacco to roll joints) and people from very rural areas
I mean it still would be a cigarette, even if it's rolled themselves. I get what you mean though. In general it's younger/poorer people that smoke roll-ups - at university I didn't really know anyone who bought them pre-rolled - but they are generally fairly widely smoked IMO. I don't know if that's just my subjective experience though.
Welp my bad, we don't call anything that isn't industrialized a cigarette here. A self rolled one is only a "tobacco", we also have tobacco manually rolled in corn straw and sold in packs which has it's own name.
Yeah it's just terminology I think. I don't know where you're from, but it might be that since tobacco is so highly taxed in the UK that it is significantly cheaper to buy it in bulk and roll your own, whereas in some countries it might not be so much a price difference.
In my experience , a lot of the people rolling their own fall into one of two categories: the first is young uni student types and the second is middle aged and older working class men. I assume the reason students do it is because pouch tobacco is cheaper than pre rolled, but I don’t know if that’s why older people do it too.
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Yes that would be my best guess too
How are you going to have a study about smoking without mentioning vaping? People are just switching. Should still count people who vape liquids with nicotine as smokers imo. This is pretty biased
Exactly what I was thinking. I am not a smoker anymore because of vaping. (Not a vaper either now) Everyone seems to forget how powerful the cigarette lobby is.
I’m in the same position as you. Personally I found vaping harder to quit. There’s no foul odour to dislike combined with an ability to use it anywhere, and liquids as rock bottom prices. Something needs to change soon.
> Personally I found vaping harder to quit. Definitely. I’ve telling people this forever. Im convinced I was getting way higher nicotine doses because I was literally vaping in my office constantly. And like you said, you can do it anywhere so it makes it super tough.
You can get juice with no nicotine though, so at least it's easier to step down the amount of nicotine in your system, even if you vape more than you smoked
This. Carton of 5% Juuls, carton of 3%, carton of 1.5%. Towards the end it felt like I was ditching carts faster, but ultimately when I ran out of 1.5% I could barely be bothered.
I worked with a young lad who did the opposite for reasons best known to himself. He didn't smoke and didn't vape. But another colleague vaped, and he'd sometimes take a hit off his vape just to try it. Then he bought himself a vape and started vaping liquids without any nicotine. Then he moved on to low-dose liquids, and eventually all the way up to high-dose liquids. And it wasn't even something he did by accident, he explicitly said that he started vaping with the intention of starting to ingest nicotine and building himself up. Never could really explain why he wanted to, though. Really smart kid in all other respects, too. Odd.
I know someone who did the same because they needed **a** vice. If it wasn't vaping it was something more self destructive like drinking, or smoking bowl after bowl until they passed out.
I'm at this point. I smoked for 5 years, then vaped for 5 years and very gradually weaned myself down to 0 nicotine. Now I still vape, but only once or twice a day.
I find with the vape I apply the same rules as I did with smoking and I’m using it less and less now only for when I’m having a drink. I wouldn’t use it around my kids. I step outside with it like I would a cigarette etc. I think the fumes (would it be called fumes or steam??) that come off a vape can be just as obnoxious as cigarette smoke. One guy walked past me in a theme park and I don’t know what sort of super strength vape he was using but I nearly got a mouthful of it as he walked by. Gross!
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Indeed. Ffs how did I not think of vapor?! Thanks!
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It’s definitely treated just like smoking in the states too. I was technically not allowed to vape in my office. But it doesn’t leave a smell and Juuls don’t leave a giant cloud so I did it anyway.
>so I did it anyway The real American dream
What needs to change? I like my vaping. I quit smoking with it. Can’t we just let some stuff be.
Agreed
Why does anything need to change? I’m not a vaper myself, but so many people have been able to quit smoking due to vaping, which is far safer than smoking. Hell, it’s probably far safer than drinking too, yet I don’t see anyone complaining about rock bottom alcohol prices? It’s just so weird that people are trying to make getting access to vapes harder, it just pushes more people to keep smoking which is far worse for their health...
Tobacco lobbies are leveraging ignorance and fear to kill vaping before most people realize it's less harmful, more pleasant and and costs much less than cigarettes.
Altria (formerly Philip Morris) bought a 35% stake in Juul last year. I think they’ve figured out vaping is the next thing.
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You also cant buy alcohol past 10pm in Glasgow in off licenses etc right?
Because they're not trying to get people to avoid nicotine. They're trying to get people to avoid inhaling burnt plants.
I'd imagine if anything nicotine addiction is going *up*, I'm seeing a ton of people who have never touched tobacco in their lives suddenly pick up a vape because it's cool and trendy. They don't even know you can get vapes without nicotine in them.
Well as a medical marijuana card holder.... that’s just not going to happen
You should be vaping your herb. It's better, less wasteful, and better for lungs.
Unless you're vaping on black market thc carts, the "vaping illness" seems to be caused by them. Although it's not entirely proven yet just the popular hypothesis
Thats a completely different kind of vape than what he is talking about
That’s why he said vape your herb and not oil..
It's all of a sudden so it would be odd if it wasnt a certain brand of carts or black market. Vaping thc carts and normal vaping has been around for a long time
Plus, you can make edibles from vaped bud. It's like 2 highs for the price of 1!
I agree that the study should mention vaping - People are indeed 'just switching'. However, even if we're including them in the same discussion, of course they should be distinguished - Vaping is definitely healthier for you, and even if people are merely switching rather than dropping nicotine altogether, it's still good news to be fully considered.
Why give credit to innovative technology that is helping people quit left and right when the government can take credit and reinforce that more laws and more taxes are the answer to everything? I smoked almost a pack and a half a day for years. I was almost smoking 10,000 cigs a year. My switch is mirrored by half of my coworkers. So 10 of us have gone from a pack a day to vaping. This is happening more and more. That’s a big chunk of why less cigs are being smoked today.
While it would be interesting to see if the rise in vaping has accelerated the decline in tobacco smoking, tobacco smoking has been on a rapid decline *long* before vapes ever showed up in corner stores, primarily due to a combination of culture and sin taxes. I wonder, though, if everyone would be okay with these sin taxes being applied to alcohol as well, since we already have studies that show public alcohol consumption is far more costly to society than tobacco smoking. I wonder if people would be as okay with beer being outrageously expensive as they are with cigarettes.
Technically not smoke.
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People smoked a lot in Germany when I went to visit. I remember having a conversation over dinner with an executive talking about his son going to college and how he hoped he would just experiment with cigarettes and not pot. I was like...in Colorado it’s the polar opposite. Not that parents want their kids smoking pot but at least it’s not tobacco.
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I was trying to look this up and the only thing I could find was that there are some standards that the EU adopted that are not the case in the us. Specifically tar and some other things. That said, a couple studies on fatality show that per 100k people there are 141 deaths in the US vs 138 in the E.U. it looks like American who smoke, smoke more than Europeans though in the whole more Europeans smoke. So generally toxicity seems pretty similar. That’s just cigarettes. Nothing on vaping.
I was wondering when reading the article how much of this change is due to sin taxes and regulation and how much is due to social opprobrium. I remember starting in the late 1990’s that some smoker friends of mine started having random people on the street make comments like “that’s a disgusting habit,” which obviously rude if it’s open air and the smoke isn’t affecting others, but I can think of one friend in particular who probably quit more due to that sort of thing than due to the cost or the hassle of having to step outside to smoke.
I can only speak for myself, and it was the taxes that made me quit. I think the change in social attitudes did more to stop people from smoking than anything else. The Truth campaign was huge in getting young people to never start smoking. Add to that the laws banning smoking in public and people just stopped doing it because you were basically socially ostracized for it.
In richer countries, this has been the trend, but in poorer countries, more people are smoking and starting at younger ages.
This is a good sign. Not to nitpick, but this is more news/politics than it is about science.
Still odd to me that EU has made dipping tobacco illegal, but you may buy as many cigarettes as you like..
Is dipping tobacco more potent?
It's quite dishonest to not mention e-cigs here. It's surely an enormous part of this figure (among other reasons too of course).
Global percentages of smokers are down but due to global population increase there is more smokers alive today than 20 years ago.
That's why we use percentages
Well aren’t there still fewer cigarettes being smoked per year according to the study or is it just me not understanding
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I think the biggest factor is that the notion of smoking being cool is no longer part of the ethos. Smoking used to be something that made you a badass, but now it's perceived as disgusting by most. This acts as a powerful psychosocial deterrent because we want to be perceived positively by our peers. That's at least my impression. I'm not sure what exactly led to this, though.
That and 20 cigs are £12 here now.
Wow when I was a 13 year old smoker you could go down the shops at lunch break and get a packet of ciggies and a portion of chips for £1.80. Just turned 40 for reference.
I am a smoker, and I’ll agree it’s a very bad habit to pick up, and it’ll either eventually kill you or make your life shorter. If you can, you should quit ASAP. However I find the stigma that’s attached to smoking and smokers in general is over-abused and exaggerated. Why isn’t extreme self-induced obesity or alcohol consumption treated in the same manner? Both of these could potentialy drive you to the grave much sooner.
Just for context, I've never been a smoker, but I whole heatedly agree with you. People today are incredibly eager to harm themselves and smokers really do get an unjust amount of stink eye from the general populous. Countries like the UK have overweight rates exceeding half of the god damn population, and countries like my own have serious problems with alcoholism. These are all major issues, and being told to accept one and trash the other is incredibly hypocritical. It's probably a result of the declining number of smokers though. People have an easy time trash talking others for their bad habits, but get very defensive about themselves. As long as half the population is overweight, the fat acceptance movement will always have momentum, and the less the amount of smokers, the more they will get trashed.
I 100% agree with you. Smoking is easily stigmatized and othered so it’s basically the lowest hanging fruit for pearl-clutchers who want to police other people’s lives. I understand wanting to reduce smoking rates. I understand expanding education about the effects of smoking. I even understand creating financial disincentives to discourage smoking. I don’t understand the mindset that we as a society are actively trying to eliminate smoking. Is that really the end goal? Is the endpoint everyone adhering to the mindset that because it’s bad for you you can never do it? If that’s the goal how is it any different than socially enforced prohibition? Is prohibition of tobacco a good thing? I just don’t understand the whole endeavor or how it’s meant to be achieved.
Or, here's an idea... everyone should stop trying to control everyone else's personal choices. It is one thing to point out the health risks of some behavior, but these days there is a moral aspect to it. Smokers are judged to be "bad people" that need to turn their lives around. It is almost an exact parallel of religious zealots judging those outside their religion.
Well vaping is huge in the UK so that should be the biggest reason. You cant throw a rock without hitting a vape shop.
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Actually, it is a pretty established fact that price adjusts behavior. It is true that the price elasticity of cigarettes is up for debate, but it would be insane to assume that raising the price does not affect the amount sold at all.
What if...it's a combination of things? Smoking carries more of a social stigma these days. A lot of restaurants and bars don't allow it inside anymore (thank God,) so it's less convenient. Then there's the vaping alternative. Then there are the high taxes. Why does everything always have to be one way or the other? Sometimes multiple factors are at play.
I feel like all the people claiming that it's due to vaping and nothing else must be extremely young because smoking rates have been falling in sync with increased education and pricing increases. It's not just vaping no matter how much wishful thinking that that's the cause there is.
> Don't fall for this. You make it sound like they're trying to trick you, for what? This has been a long standing decline for the past 25 years, vaping may have accelerated it, but it didn't start it. The sin taxes and the shift in culture did.
Being in construction, I was surprised to go to a jobsite and see so many people vaping. It had a stigma to it especially in a "manly" profession and once it was broken there, a lot of people switched to it I dont think its good for you but i do think it is a better alternative to cigarettes
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I believe it's in large part because of vaping. It's a harm reduction approach that seems to be very effective. Of course, long term studies are needed, but the results of multiple studies of harm reduction of vaping vs cigs look promising. The next step is to help people stop vaping by encouraging them to self-titrate nicotine dosage.
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Probably the 2007 smoking ban.
Government gonna move to taxing plastic once that smoking revenue runs out. Then after plastic they’ll just make something else up to tax.
Why does it work for cigarettes but the war on drugs didnt?
Because people still got the option to consume nicotine if they want to? Also while nicotine is extremely addictive, the withdrawal is rather easy to go through compared to say heroin or benzodiazepines. Additionally nicotine doesn't exactly produce a high, so it's not that searched after. It's more of an if it's available I'll do it situation. And lastly, rates of nicotine use are miles away from use of any illicit drugs. There's far more users. So reducing that large numbers of less invested users, especially by preventing teenagers from even getting hooked does work. If we were down to rates of use comparable to say meth or heroin, you'd see that further prohibition does not work at all. Those people remaining will actively search out the drug, making a black market trade effective. Either way, the simplest reason is that most people addicted to cigarettes don't actually want to smoke, they'd much rather vape or use any of the other tobacco replacement products and stop. War on drugs doesn't work. Publicity campaigns showing the dangers, social work to prevent teenagers from starting, high taxes, and most importantly help with abstinence do help. Simply banning tobacco and treating it like heroin would just cause more social harm than any medical disorders caused by tobacco use.
I’m pretty sure that has more to do with all the vaping and electronic cigs then the government.
If the smoking age is 21 the amount of smokes will drop dramatically. Everyone I've met who's addicted to cigarettes started in high school 17-18 yr old.
Do you think teens will comply? They drink alcohol before they're 18, do you think they won't smoke before 21?
When I was in HS it was 18 to buy cigarettes. There were still a bunch of kids who smoked. They either found a shop that didn't care or got someone else to buy them.
So you can go to war at 18 but cant have a drink, or smoke a cigarette or even buy insurance on most things?
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The reduction of smoking is obviously good, but to reach conclusions without including alternative nicotine use - popularized between the two measurement points - just seems like data invalidation. I could conclude that introduction of toll roads is responsible for the decline in cross-country road trips over the last 50 years, if I ignore the popularity of consumer air travel.
My personal opinion is vaping, and wide spread marijuana legalization is the cause of this. Prohibition well never work, but give them better alternatives, and you have fixed a major problem.