When All Cigarette Packages Look the Same, Fewer People Buy Them
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I live in New Zealand, which will unfortunately almost certainly be party to the TPPA before long. This will affect our ability to introduce plain cigarette packaging, resist meddling in our copyright laws and to continue using generic drugs to lower the cost of healthcare for all New Zealanders.
The only small glimmer of common sense in all this is that the Australian High Court ruled against the tobacco companies. But we'll inevitably end up spending a large amount of our tax dollars on expensive legal battles with companies whose revenue approaches our GDP if we implement legislation that favours our citizens over international big business. It's a travesty.
I know our representative governments aren't democratic (despite elections and stuff). But big capitalist corporations are even worse. So, before we get rid of governments and their ludicrously concentrated power, why don't we look at the elephant in the room first: corporations and their even more ludicrously concentrated power?
> A dying business fighting tooth and nail for their survival is understandable and expected whatever poison they happen to be selling.
This analogy (fighting for survival) doesn't really hold: corporations aren't persons. We don't care about corporations, we care about the people affected by them (both inside and outside). A corporation fighting for survival doesn't have the same moral right as a person fighting for survival, despite most laws treating them as "moral persons". Human death is horrible. The end of a business, frankly, is no big deal. (What is a big deal is the subsequent unemployment —but that can be mitigated.)
Hey, Marx is back !
Instead of looking at the wrong elephant, i.e. the one actually selling products that people want, I'd say you better attack the one that's 1) taxing you to death for subpar services 2) force-feeding their education to your kids (brainwashing) 3) getting away with mismanagement of public resources (politician immunity) 4) able to resort to violent actions should you not respect them (take your possessions, imprison you, or worse). 5) can make you go to war and die. For free.
Yeah, sure, Corporations are SUPER Evil. Except that they are actually composed of normal people like you and me, while the people in power in Governments are certainly from a far more selected class that you can never hope to reach. But believe what you want.
Selling products a minority of people want, products that the vast majority do not want their children consuming or seeing as glamourous in any way.
The fact that some people want a product does not create a moral right to that product, and does not mean it is wrong for a government to enforce laws restricting and prohibiting those products.
Actually, even in that minority, they only want the product because of the addictive substance nicotine. Most of the minority want to quit using the product, but find it very hard to do so. The rest just have a death wish :-)
Where is the moral right coming from ? That's purely philosophical and I certainly do not want the government (which is no more no less than the dictature of the majority) to tell me what's right or wrong when it comes to what I consume.
And if you don't want your children to buy cigarettes, don't give them money, or better, educate them. It works quite well, but I guess in your reasoning you expect the education to come from the government instead of the parents?
No, it doesn't work at all well.
Tobacco companies target cigarettes at children. Strict laws, with expensive enforcement, are needed to stop people selling cigarettes to children.
Never seen any tobacco ad with children smoking. There are already strict laws regarding the sales and distribution of cigarettes. Honestly, all this "finally the government is doing something" is just massive hypocrisy, because governments have been living on increasing Tobacco taxes for decades. So it's all too convenient to paint the corporations like the Big Bad Wolf when the official distribution of cigarettes was never a free market to start with.
It's more subtle than that. Most of the marketing is underhanded. You can see it in movies. When did you last see a film depicting a negative aspect of smoking? Cancer, bad smell, addiction… I personally can only recall one, maybe two instances. Most of the time, smoking is the reward after some heroic action, a sign of manliness, a classy move, a cool "rebel attitude", or just no big deal.
The studies about that are terrifying. Those films have the power to multiply the likelihood of a kid becoming a smoker by at least three. And I'm talking about kids who already have a smoker's environment (parents, friends…). For those who don't live in an otherwise smoking environment, the multiplier is ten. (Presumably, the initial risk was much lower in the first place.)
So, you don't want your kid to smoke? Turn off the TV, or have strict control over what your kid watches. Don't smoke yourself, and don't let people smoke in front of your kid. You've got to admit, past some point, it's just too much effort. Past some point, collective action is required. I think one of the first steps is to recognise that tobacco is an addictive drug. That, like any other recreational drug, it should be used with extreme care.
"The children demonstrated high rates of logo recognition. When analyzed by product category, the level of recognition of cigarette logos was intermediate between children's and adult products. The recognition rates of The Disney Channel logo and Old Joe (the cartoon character promoting Camel cigarettes) were highest in their respective product categories. Recognition rates increased with age. Approximately 30% of 3-year-old children correctly matched Old Joe with a picture of a cigarette compared with 91.3% of 6-year-old children."
For both country governments and the governments of corporations, having some amount of both democratic control (through elections, or through laws that say what corporations can and cannot do - we don't want corporations to poison our kids any more than governments) as well as some economic responsibility (which is difficult - both for CEOs and for government officials it is frighteningly easy to disguise bad performance as "properties of the global economy").
taxing you to death for subpar services? Hello, Comcast and AT&T!
brainwashing your kids? Disney or Activision would never do that!
violent action? Corporations only do that in places with weak governments, which is a good thing. Never mind that the US health care system means that firing people also means taking their health care away.
can put you into deadly situations? Well, corporations would never do that. No one died in Dow Chemical's (now Monsanto) huge chemical spill in Bhopal. Also, both corporations and governments get rather bad PR when they kill people.
> taxing you to death for subpar services? Hello, Comcast and AT&T!
you don't have to use their services. Hello, competition ? Well, if you don't have competition where you live, too bad, but then that's probably because of excessive regulation. But if you are in a free country, at least you are free to move around. That's not given in countries with STRONG governments -blink-. Ask North Koreans or even Chinese what they think.
> brainwashing your kids? Disney or Activision would never do that!
You can perfectly live without watching Disney movies or playing Activision games. Living without going to school ? Good luck with that until a gov official knocks on your door.
> can put you into deadly situations? Well, corporations would never do that. No one died in Dow Chemical's (now Monsanto) huge chemical spill in Bhopal. Also, both corporations and governments get rather bad PR when they kill people.
yeah, I'm sure corporations have millions of people's bloods on their hands. World War I ? States. World War II? States. And it's certainly not corporations who killed the dozens of Russians in the Gulags or who killed massively the Chinese during the "Cultural revolution".
Seriously, go grab a book to educate yourself.
Bwahahah, that's a good one. Competition in a natural local monopoly setting, are you kidding me? Network infrastructure, especially the last mile, is expensive. Plus, it doesn't make economic sense to duplicate it. What naturally happens in a "free" market, is, some corporation put the first lines, capture almost everyone (because let's be honest, they will have a phone and an internet connection), and have a nifty monopoly. They sometimes lease their lines, but often at higher prices than what they would charge the end customer (it actually happens in France). And don't you try to build a redundant line for yourself: you won't capture half the customers after you do that, switching is just such a hassle.
If you want competition at the last mile, the physical infrastructure must be owned by the state, or the local community. Which will then lease the lines at a reasonable prices without bulk prices that favours the big over the small. Then you will have the condition for a free and efficient market.
Competition is good, but you have to ensure its presence. Free markets are mostly good but you sometimes have to enforce that freedom. (No, that's not an oxymoron. See how static typing sometimes allow you do do things you couldn't reasonably do with dynamic typing.)
> You can perfectly live without watching Disney movies or playing Activision games. Living without going to school ? Good luck with that until a gov official knocks on your door.
I have heard of studies showing that a sizeable proportion of kids spend more time in front of the TV than in front of their professor. Couple that with the fact TV is designed to catch your attention without any effort on your part, and I'm not sure which is actually doing most of the brainwashing.
1% is one thing and I don't even know if you have any source to back this claim anyway. But look at 50% of the government official vs 50% of company executives, you'll find the companies are way more "democratic" than the officials.
But if you look at big companies (let's say bigger than the equivalent of 1000 full time employees), this is a whole 'nother business.
I don't have the answer either way, but it could be interesting to see where most people are employed. Which masters yield the most labour? States? Companies? Big corporations?
Anyway, how did you came to the conclusion that companies are more democratic than official governments? Most are command economies inside! And while they don't have the legal power to kill you, they do have the power to banish you, and do so much more often than governments do.
Does that answer your question?
Here are some alternative points of view:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/health/labo...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepac...
"Do the figures mean more people are smoking?
Well, no ... the industry admits , the number of smokers fell in 2013 by 1.4%. "
and they link to: http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/1420_bata.pdf
“From 2008 to 2012 smoking incidence, or the number of people smoking, was declining at an average rate of -3.3 per cent a year. Since plain packaging was introduced, that decline rate slowed to -1.4 per cent,” Mr McIntyre said.
“Over the five years in the lead-up to the introduction of plain packaging, total tobacco industry volumes were declining at an average rate of -4.1 per cent.
So the source material appears to support the case that plain packaging has not been an effective policy and may have slowed the decline in smoking.
The plain packaging policy looks a lot like rainmaking. Propose a policy that sounds like it might bring a decrease in smoking in an environment where smoking is already decreasing and then when smoking continues to decrease claim that it was a success.
Do you have links to reputable sources?
You say you should be suspicious, but you seem to show no suspicion of an article that starts with the sentence "LABOR’S nanny state push to kill off the country’s addiction to cigarettes with plain packaging has backfired, with new sales figures showing tobacco consumption growing during the first full year of the new laws."
Does your bias radar not kick in at this point? Or perhaps the anecdotal evidence from two smokers in Brisbane who said their friends haven't quit, and one convenience store worker in Sydney who agreed with British American Tobacco's spokesperson? Do you really consider this article to be... reliable? Did you wonder where they found these people? Are you not slightly suspicious who was feeding the info to the journalist?
It's well known that the Australian article you cite is an editorial, and an inaccurate editorial at that, by a former staffer in the Liberal Howard government. The article was highly criticized as being wrong on almost every count, most damningly by Media Watch (see here: http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s4026465.htm )
But here are a few counter articles from less biased, non-News Corp sources:
* http://www.crikey.com.au/2014/06/06/oz-exclusive-big-tobacco...
* http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/06/labor-rejects-t...
* http://www.canberratimes.com.au/national/increased-tobacco-s...
The data itself was "leaked" to the Australian and is from InfoView, who supplies this info to cigarette companies. And, surprise, surprise, the full report and data it analyses was never released publicly.
Funny that.
i) to prevent harm to the smoker
ii) to prevent harm to people around the smoker
Banning smoking in all public places may push smokers to smoke more at home or in the car, where their children are.
Since children are already severely affected by smoking we need to be careful to avoid anything that increases the amount of smoke around them.
I quitted because it's too unhealthy and i wanted to get back in sports... Which probably helped a lot (running / swimming while quitting it).
Because i also sleep more now (i'm really forcing myselve to sleep more then 4 hours / night), i'm probably less addicted to anything.
I personally smoked about 2 packs a day from 18 to 33 (that's a lot of wasted money) and quit thanks to e-cigarettes. The trick was to become a proper e-cigarette geek: didn't buy pre-manufactured juice but manufactured my own just right, with some essence of pepper for that burning sensation at the back of the throat, some mint for breath-control, and a bit of peppermint because it tastes nice.
The first week was hard (apparently - I felt it wasn't too bad, but my wife later told me I'd been a right pain in the arse), but I successfully swapped tobacco addiction to e-cigarette addiction. Since I manufactured my own e-juice, I was able to reduce the amount of nicotine with each new batch, and quickly got to entirely nicotine-free smoking.
After a while (3 months, if memory serves), making my own juice became too much of a hassle and I just stopped. Since I'd gotten rid of the nicotine addiction by then, I didn't feel any withdrawal and haven't smoked (or wanted to smoke) a cigarette in more than 2 years now.
The conclusion is that if you start craving a last cigarette, go for an electronic one. There's thousands of shops in Paris (that's where you're from, right?) and they've become surprisingly affordable - much more so than a sustained tobacco addition, at any rate.
How can they make it more addictive?
Let's take the fact that manufacturers are making e-cigarettes addictive as a given. I'm not entirely sure how that works and suspect you're talking about the juice rather than the actual device, but the distinction is not terribly relevant in that conversation.
So, ok, let's assume e-cigarettes are becoming more addictive. How does that correlate to more harmful? there are plenty of things that are highly addictive and not bad for your health in themselves - sex, say, or running for some people, or programming.
Your point about addictivity is interesting, but I don't think it tells us anything about the dangers of e-cigarettes, real or imagined.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538475/
> A routine of regular exercise is highly effective for prevention and treatment of many common chronic diseases and improves cardiovascular (CV) health and longevity. However, long-term excessive endurance exercise may induce pathologic structural remodeling of the heart and large arteries.
> Emerging data suggest that chronic training for and competing in extreme endurance events such as marathons, ultramarathons, ironman distance triathlons, and very long distance bicycle races, can cause transient acute volume overload of the atria and right ventricle, with transient reductions in right ventricular ejection fraction and elevations of cardiac biomarkers, all of which return to normal within 1 week. Over months to years of repetitive injury, this process, in some individuals, may lead to patchy myocardial fibrosis, particularly in the atria, interventricular septum, and right ventricle, creating a substrate for atrial and ventricular arrhythmias.
> Additionally, long-term excessive sustained exercise may be associated with coronary artery calcification, diastolic dysfunction, and large-artery wall stiffening. However, this concept is still hypothetical and there is some inconsistency in the reported findings. Furthermore, lifelong vigorous exercisers generally have low mortality rates and excellent functional capacity. Notwithstanding, the hypothesis that long-term excessive endurance exercise may induce adverse CV remodeling warrants further investigation to identify at-risk individuals and formulate physical fitness regimens for conferring optimal CV health and longevity.
There are, however, plenty of social reasons, depending on the local culture.
Not everybody necessarily realises that e-cigarettes are harmless to them and get upset when you use one around them, for example. Or people have had unpleasant experiences with aggressive e-cigarette consumers using them in public places like a restaurant or a train and getting uppity when asked to stop.
Another social stigma is that e-cigarette users tend to wax lyrical about them and, and I say that as an ex-user, not be very pleasant conversationalists, at least in the first few weeks after the discovery. I have seen people in social occasions actively avoid e-cigarette users (me!) for fear of being dragged into yet another lecture about vaping.
I'm quite delighted that some of my coworkers use e-cigarettes, since I can spend time around them without having to stand the horrific smell.
It doesn't seem logical to me that it's harder after 3 weeks then after 2-3 days, because i went from a pack a day to 0 cigarettes a day (instead of slowly reducing nicotine)
Sidenote: I'm actually from Belgium ;-)
When you're in another country you really notice the difference, for example in Vietnam, even small corner shops have these intricate displays of cigarette packets, often on pedestals, with bright spotlights.
People know it's bad. It's a lifestyle.
I personally feel that it is a fair balance.
If they want to reduce smoking then tie government benefits to not smoking. Ban it within the military; that they could do under the UCMJ. The for the rest, restrict where it can be sold and increase the taxation.
The cost has to become very high as even one hundred dollar monthly premiums on employee provided insurance do not stop people.
People spending money on tobacco are not spending that money on their children or paying their necessary household bills
High cost tobacco encourages criminal gangs to produce and import counterfeit products or to smuggle regular product. Smoking is harmful, but smoking some of the counterfeit cigarettes smuggled into England is even worse.
2004: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4096911.stm
2012: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4096911.stm
> One brand had eight times as much lead as normal cigarettes.
> All contained higher levels of cadmium, which can severely damage the lungs and is linked with kidney disease.
2014: video http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/health-28940681
* University of Stirling's study into plain packaging at http://phrc.lshtm.ac.uk/papers/PHRC_006_Final_Report.pdf, or
* The British Medical Journal's review of Australian Plain Packaging laws, found here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3710988/ - or...
* Perhaps it was the BMJ study into plain packaging, linked here? http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/17/6/416.full
"Cross-sectional survey during the roll-out phase of the law, analysed by timing of survey."
"How does increasingly plainer cigarette packaging influence adult smokers’ perceptions about brand image?"
The BMJ study, "Introduction effects of the Australian plain packaging policy on adult smokers: a cross-sectional study", found that plain packaging helped increase the urgency for smokers to quit. That's a causal link to reduced smoking levels.
The BMJ study "How does increasingly plainer cigarette packaging influence adult smokers’ perceptions about brand image? An experimental study" found that plain packaging helped reduce brand interest, helping reduce uptake by younger people. Again, a causal link to reducing the rates of smoking.
The surveys do provide plenty of evidence that plain packaging changes smoking behaviour. The price of cigarettes in Australia has risen due to taxation . A packet of cigarettes cost $16 in 2013, in 2014 it is now $20.
Edit: I was needlessly aggressive. Sorry.