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.
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.
then have a right leaning government win the next election and roll it back https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/510439/smokefree-generation-law-scrapped-by-coalition-government
Great. You’ve just made another illegal narcotic, a black market and a way of financing illegal activity.
I’d agree with you on that if tobacco was completely banned, but banning from a specific age, seems like a fairly low impact.
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.
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.
Thanks to taxes (81½% of the price is tax on average), smokers are currently making my government a profit, including all the cancer care. Old people need a lot of healthcare, so people dying of cancer saves a lot of healthcare cost in the long term.
You been hanging out with Sir Humphrey? ;-)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Supermarkets and businesses throwing food away and not allowing people to take it for free. (“If I can’t sell it nobody can have it”).
Would only work if you also made them immune from lawsuits due to people getting sick from eating expired food.
they already are under the good samaritan laws; they use lawsuits as an excuse for their shitty behavior.
The food would presumably “last moment before expiry” i.e. we can’t sell this tomorrow so we give it away tonight.
Requiring the purchase or use of proprietary software or formats to view or submit public records.
Collection of personally identifiable information on every website ever.
Corporate murder.
Making a profit from healthcare and health insurance.
Or even just make private health insurance illegal.
