Op-Ed: Black market coming? Australia proposes $20 packs of cigarettes

Australia is currently looking at raising taxes which would raise the price of a packet of cigarettes by 21 per cent. This policy proposal has the full backing of health and related lobbies in Canberra. This is looking like prohibition by other means.

The theory of costing smokers out of the market isn’t new. The debatable point is whether it can possibly work, even in theory. What it doesn’t address is the fact that there’s already a thriving black market in tobacco in Australia. That market can easily fill the gap in anything done about retail tobacco. I’ve actually seen kilos of roll your own tobacco under the counter in stores in Sydney, and if it’s cheaper than the retail variety, it’s not cheap. Cigarette theft is definitely on the increase, from an oddity in the past to a working criminal commodity. Health is one thing, social naiveté is supposed to be another. The assumption that smoking will cease as a result of taking it out of its brand name packets and sticking health warnings all over it is about as likely as the cessation of drinking was during Prohibition. The idea that smoking marijuana would stop as a result of making it illegal has achieved the exact opposite. The real effect of any form of prohibition has been to bankroll organized crime with money it could never have made otherwise. It’s never yet worked, with any substance, ever. Cocaine has been illegal for a century, and its use doesn’t appear to have ceased. The other effect of prohibition has been to glamorize garbage like crack and ice. These useless methods of going broke and dying miserably are a multi billion dollar industry. Tobacco, given the same image, or worse, made a “rich people’s drug”, is likely to become more popular, not less. People buy expensive things because they’re expensive, as much as for any other reason. The arguments of the anti tobacco lobbies as expressed in the Sydney Morning Herald are broad, market covering measures affecting retail sales. They all make sense from their own perspective, but there’s not a word about the likely ramifications, or the existing black market. Turning a health issue into a law enforcement issue is definitely not the way to go, if anyone is actually trying to stop people smoking. The problem with policy creation in terms of drugs of addiction is that it utterly and routinely fails to address any other issues. Policy is typically written to relate to the objectives of the writers. This is a very insular process, and few if any external factors are considered. In this case, a serious issue is likely to be made a lot more serious, simply because this policy approach doesn’t address any possible results of itself. Nor are the law enforcement issues looking like they’re getting a lot of thought. Maintaining a full time police presence to cover the likely enforcement problems of creating an instant black market isn’t going to be easy. It certainly won’t be cheap. What is proposed, in effect, is that crime takes over supplying tobacco. That means a few more billions for society’s parasites, courtesy of government policy mechanisms. Short of a major asteroid strike, not much is likely to penetrate the insular policy approach. The law believes in itself, even if nobody else does. Tobacco could make the crack wars look like a baby shower. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but there’s already a few steps being made in that direction.