How profitable was/is tobacco? | Hacker News Reader

How profitable was/is tobacco?

genehoots.substack.com

68 pointsAmorymeltzer115 comments

I've been reading Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance by Jane Gleeson-White, and the last few chapters are an exploration of double entry accounting's inability to factor in environmental degradation and social costs. In the end, price and money are poor measures of important things in this world.

Raj Patel estimates that the true cost of a Big Mac is $200: https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/The-Value-of-Nothing-by...

That's just nonsense and completely misses the point of accounting. If businesses are imposing unacceptable externalities on society then those need to be priced in using taxes.

The point of the book is that they aren't. Also, there is no real monetary value for environmental degradation. I'd recommend the book, it's very illuminating about the issue.

"But," thought the savvy businessman, "if I don't get caught then what does it hurt, right? It is smart to not pay the government what they don't actively take from you..." and so he dumped the waste runoff from his plant into the local river and wasn't caught for 30 years, at which point he was fined 1/10 of 1% of the profits he would not have made without his economic larceny.

wow. The comments are just filled tobacco sympathizers. I thought the topic was closed after decades upon decades of research. My guess some people wouldn't mind to see the world burn tomorrow if they make profit today.

Parts of the tech scene have a libertarian bent.

Decades of research have illustrated the consequences of tobacco consumption.

Science is descriptive, not prescriptive.

The actions individuals and societies take based on that information are based on their own subjective values.

If adults want to make unhealthy choices and poison themselves then let them do it. And let farmers use their land to grow whatever they want. Does that make me a tobacco sympathizer?

Make Opium Great Again

Seriously though both tobacco and a lot of other “whatever they want” crops have mountains of externalized costs and societal consequences

> And let farmers use their land to grow whatever they want.

Finally we'd be able to get blackcurrant in this country again. Shame about the pine blister rust and consequent devastation to forests and logging, but that's the price of freedom I guess.

I'm always skeptical of an industry or business being inherently profitable in the context of a public stock/equity market.

Sure, high profitability from the start is possible. But it seems like once you have an ongoing public company, whether growing or stable, the market is going to be pricing in future profits and that the profitability of the stock will tend toward average. Microsoft, Apple and Google, for example, have a tremendous venue stream and good prospects for the future ... so their stock prices are correspondingly high and investing in these stocks shouldn't be inherently better than investing on other stocks.

Each fall, farmers supplied the leaf tobacco. How did they fare economically? Tobacco had the second highest profit per acre of any crop in the world. (Only a grove of an obscure exotic nut was higher.)

Sure, I'm not even sure what matters here. Different land uses produce crops of higher or lower value. Land that can produce higher value crops is quite valuable, sure. So is land in Manhattan.

Tobacco tended to be a monopoly, monopolies get a large revenue per capital invested.

It's simpler to say tobacco was a large, concentrated industry producing an addictive drug. Any industry like tends to produce a lot of revenue per dollar invested and this is because industry leverage their connections or ability to navigate/manipulate regulators and the state.

How was tobacco a monopoly? And if it were a monopoly why was it profitable to farmers instead of the monopolist squeezing the farmers?

>How was tobacco a monopoly.

Philip Morris.

> How was tobacco a monopoly?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._American_Toba....

> And if it were a monopoly why was it profitable to farmers instead of the monopolist squeezing the farmers?

The monopolists did squeeze the farmers. It was still profitable for the farmers, but under what a fair market rate would be. Just because you're getting paid enough to keep going doesn't mean you're getting a fair rate.

It's sort of like the SF tech anti poaching. No one denies that SF engineers get paid a lot. That also doesn't mean that they didn't get shafted out of thousands by a wage fixing scheme.

> The monopolists did squeeze the farmers. It was still profitable for the farmers, but under what a fair market rate would be. Just because you're getting paid enough to keep going doesn't mean you're getting a fair rate.

Obviously it paid better than other crops, so it is not about getting paid enough to keep going.

Enough to keep going with that crop versus others.

I wonder how profitable.

There is a town in SW Ontario, Canada, named Tillsonburg. Up until the 80's, every other farm was a tobacco company, earning the nickname Tobaccoburg.

Even Stompin' Tom Connors wrote this song about working in Tillsonburg's tobacco fields: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YouShACK-H4 (Also, what a lucky URL. They rarely spell actual words.)

Since the 90's, you can drive throughout the town and surrounding area and find it very hard to find a tobacco field anywhere. You still see a lot of the old-style kilns, rarely ever a modern one, and they're nearly always in fields growing anything but tobacco.

Even when there were tobacco fields everywhere, tobacco farmers highly relied on Jamaicans coming in through the Farm Labour Pool in order to make the season profitable. There were farms that didn't use the labour pool, but they were few and far between.

The government also paid them off to get out of tobacco farming.

https://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/2008/08/01/feds_give_fa...

Production went from 38m kg in 2005 to 9m kg in 2008, I don't doubt demand dropped by 74%, so someone else picked up the slack/production value and we just import from there.

Another supply-focussed war on drugs failure.

I didn't know about the cigarette smuggling convictions. Quite interesting.

Out of the more than $1billion fine, it would be interesting to see how and where the money was allotted.

A lot of ex-tobacco farms are now growing sweet potatoes for use in biofuel. I also saw ginseng, and I'm sure there are quite a few other crops they are working on.

I think you're assuming a level of market rationality that doesn't exist IRL. In practice, certain industries have tended to be more profitable than others... even long term.

Same for stock. Apple & MSFT's stock price does, in theory, "price in" their tremendous revenue, growth potential and profitability. But.... This was also true 10, 20 & 30 years ago. Yet, investments in tech companies over those years did yield market beating returns.

I think that for tobacco and other cash crops, it helps that it's relatively durable and that the market is quality oriented.

> Apple & MSFT's stock price does, in theory, "price in" their tremendous revenue

I think this is easy to say in hindsight, but 10-20 years ago it was not at all obvious that Microsoft or Apple would be where they are today (even as recently as 2014 the outlook of Microsoft was very different than it is today).

Besides, potential future revenue is different to actually achieving it - 30 years ago companies like Commodore, Amstrad and Gateway all had tremendous growth forecasts, and maybe in an alternative universe would be the dominant players today, but history favours the winners and is always obvious in hindsight.

You appear to be confused by survivorship bias. Look back 10, 20 & 30 years ago. You'll find many other tech companies which underperformed, or completely failed. There was no reliable way to predict at the time that Apple and Microsoft would do especially well. Some long term investors who guessed right got very wealthy, but that was mostly just luck.

What does the stock valuation have to do with the profit of the actual enterprise?

> The price-to-earnings ratio (P/E ratio) is the ratio for valuing a company that measures its current share price relative to its earnings per share (EPS). The price-to-earnings ratio is also sometimes known as the price multiple or the earnings multiple.

> P/E ratios are used by investors and analysts to determine the relative value of a company's shares in an apples-to-apples comparison. It can also be used to compare a company against its own historical record or to compare aggregate markets against one another or over time.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price-earningsratio.asp

The global tobacco industry is more concentrated than ever, we might see Altria and Philipp Morris International merge again, then practically all of the world's cigarettes will be sold by 4-5 companies.

For Tobacco companies a few things are going on, the number of cigarettes sold in Western countries is declining, yet profits are up (a conundrum explained by the industry's enormous pricing power). Smoking rates are still extremely high in countries like Indonesia.

The biggest brands in the various "alternative" tobacco products like e-cigarettes are already owned by the conventional incumbents.

Simultaneously these stocks face a lot of ESG pressure and are being sold by many funds on principle, not valuation. Just looking and multiples on profit, it is remarkable how low the valuations of some of these firms is.

> The biggest brands in the various "alternative" tobacco products like e-cigarettes are already owned by the conventional incumbents.

My own observation is that most e-cigarettes in Canada and multiple countries in Europe are various Chinese devices and liquids sourced from vape shops that don't have anything from the incumbent combustible tobacco providers.

Yeah, wow. No mention of external costs makes this an incredibly naive analysis. What's the name for the fallacy of getting distracted by dollar signs to the point of ignoring downsides? "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" is a truism for a reason.

What are the external costs?

Healthcare is the big one

Who gets the profit vs who pays for the costs?

Smokers pay more for healthcare, at least in the US. That's an internalized cost, not an externality.

You misunderstand what externalized means. Externalized cost means external to the manufacturer. It is a phrase used to refer to a method os extracting profit while harming society/humanity/the world. It literally means a cost born by someone other than the one profiting.

The health cost is externalized for the producer because it is shifted to the consumers.

Whether someones profiting or not has nothing to do with it. A negative externality is simply any economic activity that imposes costs on an uninvolved party.

Cigarettes actually are a net reduction in overall cost. They mostly kill people before they get old enough to have really expensive conditions.

It also significantly reduces costs in terms of social security.

I suspect that is a myth. Treating lung cancer isn't cheap.

But dying before you collect social benefits is. Plus you have to consider the additional taxes smokers pay. In the end on average smokers are a net benefit to society financially.

But you have to take into account lost productivity, not only from people who died, but also people with varying degrees of illness such as Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. So I’d like to see a source for the statement that smokers are a net benefit to society.

To me it sounds too much like one of many myths the tobacco industry spread.

Here’s some research:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199710093371506

I think if you factor in not just healthcare but benefit payouts and additional taxes paid we find smokers are persecuted minority that more than pays their way. And they have a good chance of really suffering those last 10 years of their shorter life.

That study still ignores lost productivity from smokers. If you are on sick leave, you don’t pay taxes, and if you are dead you pay neither taxes or for insurance.

I think most people get sick from smoking at or near retirement age. Early 60’s seems like when lung disease begins to become noticeable.

So these are the years people go from productive to a net societal expense as they collect social security and Medicare.

I guess we don’t really know. But I think it’s probably true that smokers don’t end up costing society anymore than non-smokers overall.

Saying that, smoking is a ridiculous thing and I’ve seen how it not only steals years but makes those final 10 years progressively worse and torturous.

Uh, do you know what COPD ICU end of life treatment costs? I have first hand experience. It’s not cheap.

Such a claim requires impossible amounts of hard evidence to make.

There's a lot of casual smokers who never become that pack-or-two a day kind of extreme addict one can clearly attribute their smoking to their lung/mouth/throat cancer.

But they are still more likely to develop some kind of ailment from their lighter smoking, as it's equivalent to frequently subjecting your body to a poison that enters the bloodstream. Especially since it's not necessarily going to be a respiratory cancer, attributing cause becomes ambiguous enough to to make all the stats unreliable at best.

Consider the fact that some american cities ban wood burning fireplaces/stoves as a public health measure. And that's diffuse atmospheric smoke, nobody is sucking directly from the stacks day after day, year after year.

This is obviously false. As people die of lung cancer and emphysema they generate astronomical costs on the healthcare system. Health insurance then spreads that burden widely so healthy Americans pick up the tab. (assuming of course that markets would accurately reduce the cost of health insurance if costs of healthcare were to drop)

Healthy people that beat cancer 5 times and 20 other aliments and croak at 90 are really expensive. Not just in terms of healthcare they consume but social benefits like social security, assisted living, etc.

An obese person dying of a heart attach in their mid-50’s is a net positive to society since they have consumed limited health resources, collected few social benefits, and have contributed many social dollars.

Smokers die young before they collect most social benefits, plus they pay so many taxes. Smokers are a net benefit to society much like lotto players.

Why should a profitability analysis include external costs when no one in the cigarette supply chain cares about the external costs?

It sets out to address a very specific question, and does so relatively concisely. I like that it doesn't get distracted and try to address every possible question.

It's worth understanding the incentives of the businesses profiting from tobacco to help understand how it is so pernicious to society. I don't think the author is wrong to highlight the profits to businesses.

I think it's fine for the article to have a focus, profitability in this case. It's an interesting thought experiment after seeing how many people profit at each stage in the tobacco supply chain to then consider how pervasive tobacco was despite all the downsides.

Tobacco farming also exhausted soils.

https://bsc.poole.ncsu.edu/news/remembering-john-vollmer-a-c...

Social Media along with monopolistic ad giant Google is the new Tobacco.

> Only a grove of an obscure exotic nut was higher.

Anyone know which nut he's referring to?

I suspect Macadamia. Take forever to begin producing and have limited environments they thrive in. But they bring in a fortune.

All that profit and the only "downside" is causing one in five deaths in the US (before covid)!

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...

I feel like this is misleading because it's not like 1 in 5 people who smoke are dropping dead from a deadly poison. More like after 30-60 years of daily tobacco use someone dies a few years before life expectancy of cancer and/or heart/lung disease.

It's an important distinction, because otherwise the danger of tobacco and culpability of tobacco companies are exaggerated. For many people a lifetime of pleasure from nicotine justifies the risk.

Your post is posed as a plea to avoid misleading information.

You wrote: “dies a few years before life expectancy”

The article in the comment you reply to writes “Life expectancy for smokers is at least 10 years shorter than for nonsmokers”

It's terrible but not all of that is because of smoking. Smokers are often also drinkers, drug users, bad eaters, and just generally unhealthy people.

True. But doesn’t change that twofornone’s estimate of effect on mortality was incorrect.

Maybe on average it's only a few years. But some smokers live to old age, and some die of lung cancer in their early forties while their kids are still young.

Some details, which are in my view not unimportant:

- The tobacco use is not only affecting the person "choosing the lifetime of pleasure", but their surroundings too, thanks to second hand smoke.

- Nicotine is highly addictive:

"The majority of smokers would like to stop smoking, and each year about half try to quit permanently. Yet, only about 6 percent of smokers are able to quit in a given year" [1]

For me, that makes it highly questionable, if that is a voluntary choice. I know enough people, which have chosen to indulge in that particular pleasure, and after decades of abstinence still have to put a conscious effort into not relapsing (in certain situations).

[1] https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/toba...

Well, secondhand smoke is not an issue when one smokes only outside away from others or only in the company of other smokers, and I think a significant portion of people who try to quit smoking do so because of the potentially overstated risk pointed out in the comment you're responding to, or the artificially inflated cost due to sin tax imposed and justified by that potentially overstated risk. Would those people try to quit if they calculated the cost more accurately?

That said, I'm an ex smoker, and I'm glad I quit, and I will never touch a cigarette again. To me it was not so much the risk of very early death as it was the impact on my health for however many years I will remain alive, the financial cost (imposed by governments) and the fact that I came to hate smoking cigarettes and got no pleasure from it whatsoever (which is not the case with nicotine in general or other forms of tobacco such as cigars, which I do enjoy once or twice a year).

I imagine there's also some false positives from people who know that "wanting to quit" is the more socially acceptable answer.

I think the second hand smoke thing was largely overblown to make it an "us vs them" thing rather than letting smoking be a personal choice. Smoking is a terrible habit, I hate being around people who are smoking, but I really think that modern anti smoking campaigns were less about health and more about puritan values, and not being able to stand the idea of someone else enjoying themselves in ways you disagree with. We see this regularly but it usually doesn't get enough traction to matter. The "dangers of second hand smoke" happened to be what finally stuck.

From what I understand, anti smoking campaigns have actually had a positive impact on life expectancy in western countries. On that metric, this is a positive thing. Personally I don't believe it outweighs the ills of allowing others to tell you what to do in the name of your health. I actually think all of the covid craziness can trace itself back to some extent to when we gave in and banner indoor smoking in most places. You start letting people make rules "for your safety" (and try to spin it so it's really about others) and next thing you know we've got the current hysteria as a popular thing.

Edit, because everyone that's replied so far has missed the point. I dont mean second hand smoke is pleasant. The rhetoric used to make allowing or disallowing smoking not a business decision but a state mandate, is that it was killing people. This was overblown, and is a completely different bar than "it smells bad and gives me a headache" - I agree with that, but its unreasonable to argue the state should be telling people what they can't do because of it. I'd sooner see Axe body spray outlawed on those grounds, but again, it's not the states business.

Indoor smoking bans are about others. Other non smokers who do not want to smell disgusting cigarette smoke. It has tar in it and sticks to all surfaces and never goes away.

So let establishments dictate whether or not to allow smokers. And smoking sections were generally well isolated from non smoking sections.

> And smoking sections were generally well isolated from non smoking sections.

This definitely does not match my memory. If businesses had to meet air quality standards that’d be one thing but usually they just pretended that a 4 foot gap was an airlock.

That's simply not true. I've practically never witnessed properly air-gapped section for smokers and the rest. Whatever you do, you come home smelling like shit and so does every single thing on you, usually also 1 layer below.

I find it so annoying that even in 2021 smokers and apologists even here tend to marginalize this issue which directly affects everyone else, and dismiss literally everybody telling them in the face how seriously fucked up that is.

When mankind has this mentality, how can we tackle bigger issues like slowly collapsing environment, when we can't handle something so trivial and provably bad on all possible levels.

> When mankind has this mentality, how can we tackle bigger issues like slowly collapsing environment, when we can't handle something so trivial and provably bad on all possible levels.

How is this different from just saying you don't like it when people have different priorities than you?

I strongly disagree. Smokers always used the excuse that it only affected them, even though everyone knew it had a negative impact for anyone within 20-30 feet, if not how precisely bad it was.

The studies confirming the risks of secondhand smoke were what gave social and legal weight to ending that period. When businesses were faced with liability, suddenly it became possible to taste your dinner and not be exposed to carcinogens. People stopped making excuses for exposing children as soon as society stopped indulging polite lies about it being harmless.

I was one of those children. My father used to smoke. I hated it, and so did my mother - who had given up and had various respiratory problem.

We didn't get a choice.

I have no doubt that the tobacco industry is simply evil. History still hasn't come to terms with the horror and catastrophe created by an industry devoted entirely to farming and promoting addictive toxins.

Me too – my dad only stopped smoking around us when my sister and I got migraines and he couldn’t tell himself it wasn’t a problem. This was 100% supported by the tobacco companies’ well-funded propaganda machine.

US CDC claims 49k deaths a year from second hand smoke [1]

There were 36k deaths from automobile crashes in 2019. [2]

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/seco...

[2] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...

Leaving everything to “personal choice” is nice, if you live in an alternate universe where no one has any causal effect on anyone else. In this case, you are inflicting a harm on others.

An acceptable compromise is one where restaurants and others must obtain licenses to become official smoking establishments, just as bars need a liquor license. That way, children can be barred from entering, and no one will invite others to one of those establishments for social events. But it’s pretty selfish to inflict cigarette smoke on others.

What would the criteria and terms of the license be? I'm serious, how would licensing help and not just be some extra bureaucracy? Certainly I agree that a licensing system would be better than the status quo (where I am anyway) where it is impossible to allow smoking indoors in restaurants.

> it’s pretty selfish to inflict cigarette smoke on others.

The only time something is inflicted is when the government forces everyone to do it. There were smoke free places before bans, and it's peoples choice to go to a restaurant, nobody is coming to your house and smoking in it. It's simply not a place for the government to tell businesses what they can permit. If you don't like smoking, go to a place that doesn't allow it.

Even as I write this, I really don't like the idea of going to a smoky bar, but I also don't see why I have standing to impose my views on those that do, just because I have a majority opinion. I don't like dogs and if I was dictator, I wouldn't allow them out in public, but thankfully for people that like them, it's not up to me. This is literally no different except for the proportion of people that agree.

It’s not really an important distinction, because all deaths are deaths that would have happened later anyway.

I don't know a single old smoker who thinks that. My grandfather, great uncle and others acknowledged their shitty older years were their own damn fault but they urged me to never start. There was no "make a choice" or "it's worth it to some people."

I've only heard younger smokers say that but I don't think they've internalized how bad it's going to be.

At least they die peacefully and not danger other people. Alcohol causes way more harm. Let people smoke if they want. It doesn't bother me as long as they do it respectfully and away from non-smokers.

No actions live in a bubble. Wether we like it or not what you and I do affect each other. Certain things we should protect for people to do individually, and others should not be. How that is weighed is based on the level of harm. The cost of medical and other socioeconomic issues in individuals that smoke, along with them harming others through second hand smoke is a far larger cost to society. Therefore, we tax it.

Not pushing one way or the other, but it's important to consider the framing: Ignoring the second-hand smoke complexity for a moment, if everyone pays for every one else's health, then of course we should ban or tax cigarettes and/or anything that causes excess harm to a single person that others have to pay for (taxes help cover the externality). However, if each individual pays for the entirety of their own health-care costs, then it is far less obvious what actions should be taken.

To put it another way, if I was in command of an army, I wouldn't allow smoking or various unhealthy or time-wasting activities. China wants a higher GDP: ban all the video games!

This sort of social-engineering is _possibly_ for the best, and possibly for the worse, but I think it's a bit of an injustice to just state "well we all have to pay for each other's health so the policy should be ______". We don't necessarily have to all pay for each others health. Absolutes aside, a smoker should have higher insurance costs than a non-smoker.

If we all had to pay for each others hobbies, for example, you'd bet there would be folks trying to get cloud-watching banned in favor of something productive like knitting. This sort of social planning rarely works out how one expects it to.

I would argue in the US, that sort of thing benefits corporate healthcare more than anything. Nobody wants other people telling them what to do. In other words, the more people say we're going to ban ______ because I don't want to pay for your risky lifestyle through my healthcare taxes, the less likely universal healthcare will ever be a thing in the US. If we really want universal healthcare, we should allow everyone to join, thus the universal part.

But people like to preach to other people, so Que Será, Será.

> If we all had to pay for each others hobbies, for example, you'd bet there would be folks trying to get cloud-watching banned in favor of something productive like knitting.

If I had to pay for other people's hobbies, surely I'd want the opposite? Why would I prefer to buy someone yarn rather than let them watch clouds for free?

> Absolutes aside, a smoker should have higher insurance costs than a non-smoker.

This is probably false. Smokers rack up less health care costs than nonsmokers because they die earlier. The study I'm linking doesn't consider the possibility of exiting paying into a healthcare system early, but even most smokers die after retirement:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199710093371506

Retired people provide a lot of useful labor, it’s just much of it is in the home and therefore both unpaid and invisible.

Grandparents provide childcare for working children and they help take care of their spouses that would otherwise need in-home care. It’s a complicated calculation.

I think the argument that you're making is that smoking is a net-negative economically, which strikes me as plausible, if not obviously true. There you'd also need to go a step further and consider the economic contributions of the tobacco industry. You're right that it's very complicated (and macabre).

But that's a broader question than whether or not their relative costs (vs. payments) into a healthcare system. The reason I brought up retirement is that most people in the west pay into health care systems until retirement, and only (or mostly) draw from it once retired.

Hah that is interesting. I don't think it changes my point tho - maybe just makes smoking a bad example. However, I was using it as a proxy for "anything that increases your health-care costs".

I find it it interesting that spending billions on promoting smoking somehow isn't considered social engineering, but trying to prevent it somehow is.

In spirit, I agree, but just in terms of economic language, the "social engineer" by definition has to raise funds non-voluntarily. You're 100% right, we're _all_ social engineers - but if you raise your funds voluntarily (ie: on the market), you're more accurately called a capitalist, at least in the language of econ.

>However, if each individual pays for the entirety of their own health-care costs, then it is far less obvious what actions should be taken.

This doesn't exist in the nature we find modern civilization in. You pay for others health, one way or another. We either pay for it sooner and reap the benefits of people being able to work, have families, money, or you pay for it with poverty, crime, "blood". You also pay for it with driven yet disadvantaged people not being able to rise to positions that use their abilities. Example: Students.

Health is inherent to humans. To be human at all is to have health and medical requirements. Cloud services are not a requirement of your very existence.

This is a horrible argument. I could apply the same logic to all your unhealthy habits as well.

I don’t smoke but regressive tax structures and social control “for the greater good” are signs of a dystopia.

Good intentions, road to hell…etc

Quite a lot of people on HN are arguing for such social control in the US through promoting a universal healthcare system. And which many countries currently implement… so your contrarian opinion is interesting.

How would you balance tradeoffs in either direction?

I'm not sure I understand your question.

I do not believe that universal healthcare cannot exist without prohibition and regressive taxes.

"good intentions are a road to hell" is false with some very basic thought experiments. For example, read the U.S. consitution, specifically on its ammendments. Freedom of speech is a good intention. Individual autonomy at all is a "good intention" just as much as fascism is. Everyone can have conflicting good intentions, therefore it's a poor argument that doesn't address the merits.

You could apply that argument to other unhealth habits. Heart Disease is one of the most deadly and debilitating problems in the U.S., which should be met with significant tax on sugary products. The health costs are astronomical and deadly. However you're strawmanning my argument, there is a weight to when someone deserves regulation and does not. Many "unhealthy habits" do not rise to a great enough problem or have other benefits. For example, sitting at the computer is an "unhealthy habit", and it can be quite lucrative in certain work.

Dystopia is when a private company advertises to children that they should take a substance that company designed to be heavily addictive and harmful to themselves and everyone around them.

Social control is an natural part of humans and has always existed. Government regulations, when done in certain methods, demonstrably work. Other times, they do not.

So who gets to be the arbiter? So many people seem to think we can tax and incarcerate our way out of every problem. Those are simple solutions to complex problems. Of course magnitude matters. Clearly we disagree on where the line is.

Sin taxes are regressive. They disproportionately affect poor people and those who are most affected by an addiction. Societal benefit at the expense of the most vulnerable is not something I support, even if you claim some utilitarian gain.

And surely you understand that the saying about hell and good intentions does not mean “all good intentions are backwards”

EDIT: Do you truly care only about the total quantifiable cost of health care? I think there's more to the human experience. Also, ask yourself...who costs more? The healthy person who lives to be 100? Or the smoker who dies at 50?

Who gets to make the constitution? Same answer. We can tax our way out of problems. Prohibition of alcohol never worked, but taxing it certainly does. Incarceration doesn't, because it doesn't properly address alcoholism - which is a medical and societal issue.

Sin taxes don't disproportionately affect poor people, the substances that are being taxed, do. The profiteers of those substances reap the reward but not the societal cost. Therefore taxes are a necessary force to offset the effects.

Let's think creatively. If someone had a child when they're 30, dying at 50 makes that child 20. Now you have a generational cost. You also don't just up and die, generally speaking. It is instead lung cancer, heart disease, disability, and overall failure of health over time. The effects by that point are not readily reversible. They will be less able to work, generating less to local and global economy. Less involved with their children, leading, again, to disparities in generational wealth.

> Prohibition of alcohol never worked, but taxing it certainly does.

Yes because clearly we've beaten alcoholism /s

> Sin taxes don't disproportionately affect poor people

Do you know what a regressive tax is? I suggest you do a quick search. Sin taxes ARE in fact regressive. Poor people spend a larger percentage of their income on these taxes, even if they consume the same quantity. Its basic math.

"There should be no debate about whether taxes on food, alcohol, tobacco and soft drinks (‘sin taxes’) are regressive. It can be easily demonstrated empirically, and countless studies have done so. As with most indirect taxes, they take a greater share of income from the poor than from the rich in all plausible scenarios."[1]

[1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3853609

> You also don't just up and die, generally speaking. It is instead lung cancer, heart disease, disability, and overall failure of health over time. The effects by that point are not readily reversible.

Why are you ignoring the cost of living longer? Smokers still live long enough to work into retirement, on average.

"Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on. The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000...

"This throws a bucket of cold water onto the idea that obesity is going to cost trillions of dollars," said Patrick Basham, a professor of health politics at Johns Hopkins University who was unconnected to the study. He said that government projections about obesity costs are frequently based on guesswork, political agendas and changing science."

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.9748...

That's not a very complete representation. When my grandmother died from lung cancer that metastisized to her brain, there was nothing particularly peaceful about the coughing and hacking (sometimes with a fair share of blood) that would send her into fits of convulsions, the tumor induced dementia, etc. Nor the effects that it had on her kids who grew up in an environment of insatiable chain smoking.

You're putting your argument out of my context. Your grandmother was not a 'respectful smoker'.

Peacefully?? Go watch someone die of emphysema, it's pretty terrifying to be slowly suffocated to death.

Misinterpretation. Peacefully in the sense, without violence.

why the prejudice against alcohol then? Drugs are drugs. It's not the alcohol that makes people violent. The majority of people just get more relaxed and funny. Those people that get violent already have a problem - and alcohol is not it.

Yeah slowly dying 5 years and giving your closest the gift of watching you wither away, 1 cell at a time is really peaceful, almost dream-like...

Second-hand smoke causes plenty of harm.

No danger to other people? I wonder how many deaths are due to cancer patients using up an outsized proportion of a nation's healthcare budget.

How many deaths does smoking marijuana cause?

Marijuana is much less damaging to the lungs than tobacco smoke:

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2012/01/98519/marijuana-shown-be-l...

> Whether smoking marijuana causes lung cancer, as cigarette smoking does, remains an open question.

https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/mari...

Gonna have a hard time trusting information from 'drugabuse.gov', given our nations shakey history with drugs. Egg on my face for saying that though given this quote from a little further down than yours

"However, while a few small, uncontrolled studies have suggested that heavy, regular marijuana smoking could increase risk for respiratory cancers, well-designed population studies have failed to find an increased risk of lung cancer associated with marijuana use."

Thats not exactly what it says:

“An important factor that helps explain the difference in effects from these two substances is the amount of each that is typically smoked,” Pletcher said. “Tobacco users typically smoke ten to 20 cigarettes/day, and some smoke much more than that. Marijuana users, on average, smoke only two to three times a month, so the typical exposure to marijuana is much lower than for tobacco.”

And there are also (naturally) economic downsides as well:

  The costing model in this study covers three areas where smoking has been shown to 
  create ‘external’ costs: the direct costs to European public healthcare systems in a given 
  year; productivity loss to the EU27 economy due to increased absenteeism; and the 
  monetised cost of premature mortality

  Taking the three main cost factors together, the loss to the EU in 2000 is estimated to be at 
  approximately €363 billion. This figure corresponds to about 3.4% of the EU27 GDP.

https://ec.europa.eu/health/sites/default/files/tobacco/docs...

Seems like some double dipping here. Not familiar with the EU patterns, but if seniors & retired people receive income from public sources, like Social Security in the US, then premature mortality results in a big savings, not additional costs.

Many smokers don't die suddenly. Even with heart attack/stroke, many will end up living for a next decade or two on daily expensive medicine and frail health.

Those going down with cancer will cost literally tons of money due to high cost long treatments. There is no cheap cancer medicine.

The idea smoking actually cuts down social costs is laughable and doesn't make any financial sense.

No, I recall Canada doing such a study decades ago. A lung cancer death might be years and expensive treatments but it pales in comparison to say dementia where you’re housing a patient who needs 24/7 care for a couple decades.

Plus smokers pay high tobacco taxes and fully contribute to pension plans prior to their early demise. This particular study found their smoking was a net positive, from a financial perspective.

Well, while you search for the link to that study and share it with us, we can spend time reading this chapter from a report about the tobacco cost in Australia (updated August 2021) that lists net present value of "healthcare costs avoided" being merely 2/3 of the lost productivity due to premature deaths alone.

Total tangible costs come out to 9.5 times greater than those savings, if you try to put a cost on the suffering caused by premature death and ill health the costs are 50 times greater than the savings from healthcare avoided.

https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-17-economics/1...

Financial costs bud. Trying to estimate the “productivity lost” is one of the squishy numbers you make up to prove a point you already formed.

Measure dollars in versus dollars out. Not theoretical dollars that may or may not happen in the future.

Sorry, I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying you need more time to find the link to the study you were talking about?

> The idea smoking actually cuts down social costs is laughable

I never claimed this. I am stating however, that it would appear that the proper equation for the referenced article should be healthcare costs + productivity loss - premature mortality, not the sum of all 3. I would not expect that the total is anywhere close to net negative, but I would expect it to be less than the reported €363 billion.

They should break this down further, and state the average dollar hit per smoker. Most people don't mentally comprehend how many smokers there are in the world at any given time, or whether the financial impact even high when applied to an entire population.

"On average YOUR smoking costs approximately $X" would be far more easy to understand.

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