International News Smoke-free NZ.....

Barmy idea, but it will be easy to get around, just get someone older than you to buy them (be a bit surreal in the future to see 40 year olds hassling 50 year olds outside kiwi corner shops to buy them fags).

The last country that tried to prohibit the sale of something that was previously legally widely used and available was the US with booze, that led to the rise in power and influence of the Italian American version of the mafia and organised crime getting its tentacles into US governance.
I know what you’re saying, but I think it might work. As an ex smoker I reckon smoking is not as enjoyable as drinking or as much a part of life- it’s a compulsive habit that hopefully young people there won’t start.
 
@Sarge You can do it. I was a cigar smoker prior to the heart attack. Had to stop and did, don't miss it at all.

Don't drink either, coffee and water for me.

Still addicted to football, can't kick that.
 
You can do it @Sarge. For me the key was realising that the habit, not the addiction was what I had to kick. (Nipping out from the office for a fag. Fresh pint, fresh fag etc). Just taking a deep breath every time I wanted a fag really helped. That was 22 years ago.
Gave up booze this February too because that wasn’t doing me much good. That’s harder socially, (got a Queensland colleague who calls me a poofter every time he sees me with an unleaded beer), and psychologically (4 or 5 months of feeling a bit humourless and boring) but I feel a hell of a lot better for it.
 
Surely the risk of an illegal trade is much lower as it's being phased out rather than forcing a load of smokers to give up instantly? Future generations will grow up without smoking (or at worst it will be a much smaller proportion) and won't have as much desire to smoke. Much better idea than just telling the country to stop.
 
Surely the risk of an illegal trade is much lower as it's being phased out rather than forcing a load of smokers to give up instantly?
Precisely. There is a logic to it on paper. The key will be in ensuring that there is constant education along the way to remind people why it is that they’ve taken this decision. If nothing else it’s a government being willing to take some semblance of responsibility for people’s well-being and attempting to make a positive change, and investing in a long-term benefit. They’re trying to do something that goes beyond their own term in office and their own methods of self-preservation. It’s a far cry from politicians in this country basically going, “Listen, do what you like, make a scene every now and then so that we know what you want even if it’s a stupid idea, and then we can say that’s the plan so that we get to keep our jobs, cos we’re basically your mates really and we get it. How does that sound?”

The real question is: how big are their flags?
 
NZ wine is brilliant. I’ve been to NZ for a month a few years ago and found all the wines from Marlborough extremely good. They will get cheaper now we have a trade arrangement.
When we visited Oxford and stayed recently I found the best wine I’ve ever tried was one from Wallingford that can be bought at the Oxford Wine Company. £12 a bottle seems a lot and one of the pubs near Witney was charging £27.
I am afraid I don’t agree with you on drugs. My view is that drugs have fuelled crime and to allow addictive drugs to be sold legally would result in high levels of misery.
Just seen this. We had a trade agreement, this is obviously a new one. I believe it’s going to take a whole 20p off of a bottle.
 
If I have to choose between English and NZ wine, for me it’d be English every time
 
Just seen this. We had a trade agreement, this is obviously a new one. I believe it’s going to take a whole 20p off of a bottle.
Of which there is no guarantee will end up with consumer savings as opposed to retailers hogging any minuscule decrease per unit. In return for an agreement that also sees us battering our own farmers and moving towards a situation where we import more meat from literally the furthest country away from Britain on the planet, which not only threatens our agriculture industry but provides an eye-watering increase in terms of carbon emissions. It’s not easy being green, indeed.

Still. *pop* *glug*
 
Precisely. There is a logic to it on paper. The key will be in ensuring that there is constant education along the way to remind people why it is that they’ve taken this decision. If nothing else it’s a government being willing to take some semblance of responsibility for people’s well-being and attempting to make a positive change, and investing in a long-term benefit. They’re trying to do something that goes beyond their own term in office and their own methods of self-preservation. It’s a far cry from politicians in this country basically going, “Listen, do what you like, make a scene every now and then so that we know what you want even if it’s a stupid idea, and then we can say that’s the plan so that we get to keep our jobs, cos we’re basically your mates really and we get it. How does that sound?”

I guess what makes me a little uneasy about this law is that it's another step on the road to the government taking responsibility for individuals' well-being, as opposed to the individual being responsible for their own well-being. And if you start working your way along that spectrum, where do you stop?

I mean smoking is an undeniably idiotic thing for a person to do. It has a very high chance of killing you - the NHS states that about 78,000 people die of smoking-related illness per year.

But to be honest - so is drinking. It's not as bad, but alcohol was still directly responsible for about 9,000 deaths in Britain last year. And then what about fatty foods? Processed foods? Sugary drinks?

If the government made us all eat an ideal diet, and we all had three sessions of government-regimented exercise per day, then we'd likely all be healthier and live a lot longer. But I don't think I would call it a free society - in a free society, people have to be free to make bad choices.


Now I'm all for legislation that protects individuals from other peoples' bad choices.
Banning smoking in public places - absolutely on board; increased taxation and/or fees to pay for smokers' medical care - no argument with that. hell, you want to make it an offense to promote or persuade another person to start smoking - I could get behind that as well.

I'm just not really down with outright banning an individual from doing something that's only going to be harmful to themselves. I kinda like being able to have some vices.
 
I guess what makes me a little uneasy about this law is that it's another step on the road to the government taking responsibility for individuals' well-being, as opposed to the individual being responsible for their own well-being. And if you start working your way along that spectrum, where do you stop?

I mean smoking is an undeniably idiotic thing for a person to do. It has a very high chance of killing you - the NHS states that about 78,000 people die of smoking-related illness per year.

But to be honest - so is drinking. It's not as bad, but alcohol was still directly responsible for about 9,000 deaths in Britain last year. And then what about fatty foods? Processed foods? Sugary drinks?

If the government made us all eat an ideal diet, and we all had three sessions of government-regimented exercise per day, then we'd likely all be healthier and live a lot longer. But I don't think I would call it a free society - in a free society, people have to be free to make bad choices.


Now I'm all for legislation that protects individuals from other peoples' bad choices.
Banning smoking in public places - absolutely on board; increased taxation and/or fees to pay for smokers' medical care - no argument with that. hell, you want to make it an offense to promote or persuade another person to start smoking - I could get behind that as well.

I'm just not really down with outright banning an individual from doing something that's only going to be harmful to themselves. I kinda like being able to have some vices.
You could argue that smoking is in a category of its own as it is so dangerous. And I'm not sure they're banning it, they're just not allowing cigarettes to be sold to people of a certain age.
 
You could argue that smoking is in a category of its own as it is so dangerous. And I'm not sure they're banning it, they're just not allowing cigarettes to be sold to people of a certain age.
I think the other thing is that there is no good side. Unlike various kinds of food health issues there is no benefit to “smoking in moderation”, or people who swing in the opposite direction and “undersmoke”.
The argument around alcohol could be considered the same, but it appears that alcohol acts as a much stronger social glue than smoking, and while tee-totallers don’t particularly like being around people off their tits, generally sober people are happy around people drinking whereas non smokers typically dislike being subjected to smoke.
So although it is a bit authoritarian I’d say that smoking really has so few upsides that a ban is worth trying.
 
Precisely. There is a logic to it on paper. The key will be in ensuring that there is constant education along the way to remind people why it is that they’ve taken this decision. If nothing else it’s a government being willing to take some semblance of responsibility for people’s well-being and attempting to make a positive change, and investing in a long-term benefit. They’re trying to do something that goes beyond their own term in office and their own methods of self-preservation. It’s a far cry from politicians in this country basically going, “Listen, do what you like, make a scene every now and then so that we know what you want even if it’s a stupid idea, and then we can say that’s the plan so that we get to keep our jobs, cos we’re basically your mates really and we get it. How does that sound?”

The real question is: how big are their flags?
Education is very important undoubtedly, but I am not sure that banning it is a particularly good thing.
Maybe it will work (I think it a little unlikely). Personally I think education and increasing tax on smoking is better than banning it. If it works what next? Obesity, drinking , processed foods kill a lot if people and are obviously bad for people's health.
I am.not sure that the government's role should really be banning things like smoking
 
I see it as an interesting experiment.
 
Education is very important undoubtedly, but I am not sure that banning it is a particularly good thing.
Maybe it will work (I think it a little unlikely). Personally I think education and increasing tax on smoking is better than banning it. If it works what next? Obesity, drinking , processed foods kill a lot if people and are obviously bad for people's health.
I am.not sure that the government's role should really be banning things like smoking
I think that's lazy thinking - obviously you don't ban things that are a bit bad, and have upsides. Most people agree that you do ban things that are very bad. Smoking is arguably very bad and has no upsides, as @chuckbert says.
 
Education is very important undoubtedly, but I am not sure that banning it is a particularly good thing.
Maybe it will work (I think it a little unlikely). Personally I think education and increasing tax on smoking is better than banning it. If it works what next? Obesity, drinking , processed foods kill a lot if people and are obviously bad for people's health.
I am.not sure that the government's role should really be banning things like smoking
I don’t see why tobacco products, which can only cause you sickness and death, should ever be legal and so readily available. And I say that as an ex-smoker of about a decade, who absolutely loved smoking, in the interest of openness. There is no ‘medicinal’ use in the way that you can claim so about certain alcohols, or certain types of marijuana (yet it’s banned in many parts of the world). All it does is slowly kill you and make you sick along the way. Do we need that? Do we need anything that we now know can only harm us? Aren’t we supposed to be an advanced species capable of learning and applying new knowledge? Once we realise something is toxic and can only cause harm, do we not have a duty to use our cognitive thinking to eliminate it? It seems strange to me that a big chunk of humans as a species want to protect their right to knowingly make bad decisions, and again, I say that as someone who has caught themselves doing so many times in their life, and constantly strived to get better in that department. If we sat and watched a load of monkeys purposefully and repeatedly doing things that they know only does them harm, and in some cases kills them slowly and painfully, we would be dismayed at their stupidity and there would probably be protestors saying that somebody should step in and take those things away from them. So I find it weird that when we are the monkeys, we don’t always want to do the same thing.

I am of course being intentionally extreme with my analogy (to a point), although I do stand by the core principle of what I’m saying. Parents let their kids make their own decisions on a lot of matters, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, but they usually learn from getting it wrong and adjust their boundaries moving forward, and there are certain things where they go, “absolutely not, never on my watch” and that’s that. So why can’t a government, assuming the role of the parent, do the same when it knows that there is no benefit to the citizen? Does it not have a duty to eliminate something that only has negative consequences with absolutely zero upsides? Why would it want to protect the threat?

Processed foods is vastly different, as that’s often a poverty issue. I was raised in a very poor environment where highly processed, often frozen food was our only way to eat and therefore survive. It’s not good for you and as time goes on it’s obvious that long term it leads to huge cancer increases (when I was a kid the adverts used to say one in four people would get cancer in their lifetime, now they all say one in two), but for some people it’s all they have access to. That’s the thing we need to worry about and ultimately change - access and affordability to decent quality food. Should we get rid of processed foods entirely? In principle and purely on paper, absolutely 100%, but there’s a lot more at stake and a lot more to figure out before you can just turn the tap off. You can’t compare smoking to eating crap food as one of them serves no essential purpose - if you don’t smoke a cigarette it’ll never impact you negatively in any way, but if you don’t eat food and your only option in the form of cheap and nasty stuff is removed then you’ll die. Sure, many people can afford to not eat processed food and still choose to, but you can’t do much about that unless you’re wanting to dish out poverty cards and only allow carriers to purchase it. That’s where you hope that education steps in to minimise poor choice alongside unfortunate necessity, but where is the necessity with a cigarette? What would anyone really protect cigarettes for? Because of free choice? Cool - where’s my free choice to buy a safe and tested strain of marijuana from a licensed dispensary, which I know can’t cause me any biological or psychological harm (as well as providing tax revenue) because it’s government grown and has undergone extensive testing? Where’s my choice to buy a line of cocaine that I know has been equally and safely prepared and poses no risk of being mixed and diluted with concrete, or any other foreign powders? What’s so special about cigarettes that they need protecting?

I do understand the point that you raise in principle, and the suggestion that things like this can seem like slippery slopes and pose questions of where you draw lines moving forward, and I’m really not an advocate for a supreme nanny state or dictatorship. I do think that education is key to most issues, and I don’t know how it’ll go down in NZ. I guess nobody will know for decades to come, and even if they have the right call on paper they might have the wrong method. But I do personally think that when it comes to something that we know has absolutely zero trade off, zero upside and can only and exclusively cause illness, suffering and death, it’s not that outrageous for someone to go, “Why do we allow this again?” Cigarettes are pretty rare in that case. I can’t think of many other things that can only be used to poison yourself, which have no other use and possess not even the smallest potential benefit. You can only smoke them and they can only make you sick or kill you.

It’s probably a good thing that the debate has been opened up though, right? Feels good to have some sort of conversational exchange that isn’t about trade deals and flag shagging.
 
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