• PonyOfWar@pawb.social
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    3 months ago

    Smoking. Millions of euros of taxpayer money spent every year on those lung cancer patients which could be well spent elsewhere. It’s also an activity that negatively affects not just the smoker but everyone around them.

    • stoy@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      Smoking is something I truly despise, we all know that it is bad, really bad for you, we teach kids about it, yet people still start smoking.

      Do as New Zealand did, set a cut off year, if you are born after 2015, you will not be permitted to buy tobacco at all.

      • wewbull@feddit.uk
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        3 months ago

        Great. You’ve just made another illegal narcotic, a black market and a way of financing illegal activity.

        • stoy@lemmy.zip
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          3 months ago

          I’d agree with you on that if tobacco was completely banned, but banning from a specific age, seems like a fairly low impact.

            • stoy@lemmy.zip
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              3 months ago

              The use would be drasticly cut down, we’ll never get every one…

              • wewbull@feddit.uk
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                3 months ago

                What I meant was that “a ban from a certain age” is a total ban eventually. Black market will grow as the ban becomes more and more complete.

      • kratoz29@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        What I find amusing is that the cigarettes packages where I live have disgusting images with the potential sickness it comes from its usage, and yet people still buy them 'hey man, this will literally kill you someday" warning does not work.

        I thought this was a well known measure but it seems that my USA cousin did not know about this kind of marketing.

      • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        They ought to increase it by 2 years every time. That way people have to get clean. Also, we ( US citizens) should take control of all tobacco companies, and wind them down, putting all profits and assets towards addiction recovery services, and cancer treatments.

        They’ve been making billions off of slowly killing people for the last 100+ years, they don’t need one more fucking day.

    • Kanzar@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      The tax on cigarettes is so high, it’s been claimed they pay more into the system than they claim out, as they die too soon. 🫣 (In Australia)

      • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        At least here in Germany this is apparently still not true as smokers in particular add a huge cost to the healthcare system due to the long-term and repeated damage. For example, once they get parts of their feet amputated from clogged arteries, most actually continue to smoke (“Ah well now it’s too late anyways”), and hence will get half a dozen such amputations over time.

        • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Obesity is the issue these days not tobacco. Tobacco use is a fraction of what it once was. Now a huge portion of the EU and USA is obese, which causes way more strain on the healthcare system.

        • Kanzar@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          Haha I had to go digging.

          So it is mentioned in an Australian page about the costs of Tobacco in Australia:

          https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-17-economics/17-2-the-costs-of-smoking#17.2.6

          A report commissioned by the tobacco company Philip Morris, when the Czech government proposed raising cigarettes taxes in 1999, concluded that the effect of smoking on the public finance balance in the Czech Republic in 1999 was positive, an estimated net benefit of 5,815 million CZK (Czech koruny), or about US$298 million. 77 The analysis included taxes on tobacco, and health care and pension savings because of smokers’ premature death, as economic benefits of smoking, and these benefits exceeded the negative financial effects of smoking, such as increased health care costs. The report created a furore; public health advocates found the explicit assumption that premature death is beneficial morally repugnant. The controversy was described by the journalist Chana Joffe-Walt on the radio program This American Life,78 and was reported in the British Medical Journal.79 According to This American Life, Philip Morris distanced itself from the report in response to the controversy, banning its employees from citing the findings. In fact, the report’s claim that smoking was beneficial relies on its inclusion of taxes as a benefit, not any savings due to smokers’ premature deaths80 Costs associated with smoking while the smoker was still alive totalled 15,647 million CZK, 13 times more than the ‘benefits’ associated with early death. The net benefit reported in the analysis arose because the tobacco tax revenue of 20,269 million CZK was regarded as a benefit. As detailed in Section 17.1.1, taxes are not an economic cost (or benefit); they are a transfer payment. The recipient (the government) gets richer, while the taxpayer gets poorer.

          So darkly amusingly it has actually been reported before, but in the Czech Republic.

          • otp@sh.itjust.works
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            3 months ago

            So darkly amusingly it has actually been reported before, but in the Czech Republic.

            …in a study funded by a tobacco company.

          • stoy@lemmy.zip
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            3 months ago

            Thank youj for the link, I read the section you linked to and the cancer council seems like a good soruce, and it was about what I expected.

      • Dave.@aussie.zone
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        3 months ago

        Australian here, in Finland. Holy shit it seems everyone smokes like chimneys here.

        Never really thought about how much smoking has declined in Aus over the last 20-40 years, but yeah coming over here has been an eye opener.

        • Kanzar@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          Seems to be a Europe thing, or really a rest of the world thing. It’s very rare to smell cigarettes, particularly after vaping took off.

          • Bye@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            In my country there was like 10 wonderful years when almost nobody smoked.

            In the last 5-10 years all that got reversed by vaping, it’s everywhere now. Not as bad as smoking though.

    • Taalnazi@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Yeah, and unlike what people commonly think, it doesn’t just directly affect the user (first hand smoke) and the people around it (second hand smoke), but also the furniture and nature around it (third hand smoke).

      I despise those cigarettes laying around everywhere in nature. You can even smell them on remotes if someone was a hardcore smoker.

      They need help in kicking off from it.

    • Xavienth@lemmygrad.ml
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      3 months ago

      You just trade out legal distributors for illegal distributors while ruining the lives of smokers by cycling them in and out of prison, feeding their need to smoke even more. Bad idea.

      • z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        Yeah, I’m surprised at how many people here would simply like to add tobacco to the list of controlled substances and add more fuel to the shit firestorm that is the Drug War.

        Do I believe the tobacco industry should be far more heavily regulated than it currently is? Absolutely. I actually feel that way about most legal drugs.

        But imprisoning people for doing what they want with their own bodies in their own homes has already proven to be ineffective at curtailing drug use and abuse.

        Additionally, the inhumane treatment of prisoners and former prisoners is a whole separate topic, but related in that the Drug War is just a corrupt mechanism to feed the prison-industrial complex. Why add another drug (tobacco) to the list of drugs cops can plant on your person and send you off to jail for?

    • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      i hate tobacco but prohibition doesnt work.

      we should have learned that lesson with alcohol and weed but it seems we did not.

    • Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 months ago

      Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I have less problems with the “luxury” items, such as cigars.

      They’re usually hand-crafted expensive stuff that’s made to enjoy once and a while, compared to cigarettes which are mass produced with the sole purpose to get you addicted.

      I think the same is true with alcohol. There’s the cheap, mass produced stuff vs the more expensive “hand”-crafted stuff.

      I wish we could just enjoy these things without corporations trying to get us addicted to them at every opportunity, disregarding any of the dangers associated with consuming them.