Australia has the world’s highest tobacco taxes. A packet of 25 tailor-made costs $50 AUD or about $35 USD. Call it $2 per gram. So it’s no great surprise that illegal tobacco is a magnet for organized crime.
The big prices supposed to deter smokers obviously can’t, and don’t, work. It’s effectively a type of Prohibition, and that has never worked for any substance. The price policy, as so often with prohibitionist policies has stagnated. The typical progress of these policies is that nobody questions their effectiveness. If the policies are to change, it takes forever.
Meanwhile, billions are flowing to organized crime, the other inevitable result of price rises and/or illegality. Price rises on this scale instantly create black markets. Doesn’t matter if it’s tobacco or cornflakes, jack up prices and in comes the black market.
It’s been quite the own goal for the anti-smoking policy. Legal tobacco can’t even pretend to compete for prices. Illegal tobacco is way cheaper. You can get 100 cigarettes for about $10. So it’s game over there. Sales of illegal tobacco are huge.
The anti-smoking view can’t even claim any success. The billions in illegal tobacco sales show very clearly smokers aren’t quitting. Bear in mind how much cheaper illegal tobacco is.
More tobacco is being consumed, not less.
Let’s try some basic arithmetic. If a packet of smokes is 5 times more expensive legally, the illegal market represents 5 times the amount of tobacco being consumed. Still think you’re winning? How? On what statistical basis, when the sheer volume of tobacco seizures says so clearly otherwise?
Let’s try that $2 per gram legal cost as a metric – 264 tons of illegal tobacco, and 540 million cigarettes have been seized since 2018, say the stats. These numbers apply to a country with only 25 million people, remember. Illegal tobacco is still making billions, despite these seizures.
How is this policy even claiming to work? How could it? It’s just another officially-created goldmine for crime. Like the War on Drugs, it’s a sort of Vietnam.
Tobacco growing vs tobacco production
The pity of it is that the policy if it was serious or even vaguely well-informed, would have sorted out some problems. Tobacco, legal or otherwise is roundly criticized for its added chemical compounds, and other well-known toxins. These include arsenic, lead, pesticides, benzene compounds to aid burning and god knows what else.
Ironically, you don’t need any of them to grow or cure tobacco. Nicotine is a pesticide. Traditionally, tobacco is cured with sugar, which burns much hotter. So you could eliminate a virtual encyclopedia of toxins at the source.
(I’m a qualified horticulturalist. I’ve grown Havana tobacco and cured it. It’s no problem at all.)
There actually is “organic” tobacco already on the legal market. So at least it can be grown and marketed without the garbage. None of this basic information is even on the radar for policy.
Vaping
Vaping has to be mentioned. The current headlines about vaping on any given day tell the story. Initially, there were no problems with vaping. Now there are problems, including oxidized vape liquid compounds, overdoses of nicotine, and more.
Making vaping illegal and therefore unregulated and therefore unregulatable hasn’t exactly helped. Anything can get on the market, and it’s pretty weird that nobody thought of that. The current market can’t even be monitored. Problems get noticed, but not actual usage.
It’s not at all easy to OD on nicotine, but obviously, it’s possible enough. Better to regulate than to simply avoid the issue by mindless prohibition. There’s no need for any form of toxicity in vaping products either, but who cares?
The policy millstones, lobbies, and contradictions.
One of the most basic problems with tobacco is that nobody bothers to even consider why people smoke. It’s a relaxant.
Imagine anyone living in an idyllic world like this needing a way of relaxing! Unthinkable, isn’t it?
You don’t need a PhD in pharmacology to see the obvious here, either:
Oxidized nicotinic acid is an analog for vitamin B3. You need receptors to get addicted to anything, and vitamin B3 has plenty of receptors. B3 deficiency can result in a condition called pellagra, the symptoms of which are insanity and death.
(So if you’re dead and insane, you may have a problem. You should complain, dear.)
B3 is a mood stabilizer. B3 is a “brain sugar”, and it’s reduced by actual sugar, which is now unavoidable in the food chain. Tobacco is a de-stimulant, in that sense, replacing the lost B3 as you consume tons of sugar. That’s also why a smoke and coffee work. …So tobacco is effectively a calm-down option. It was actually prescribed by doctors in the 1950s for that reason; to relieve stress.
None of this very basic information was under any sort of consideration when the lobbying started. A thing which relaxed people was the problem. So they solved the problem by making criminals rich and forcing people to do something illegal to get their relaxants.
Not too hard to follow the logic, is it?
- Instead of providing alternatives or making the product safe, every other option was applied.
- Absolutely no effort at all went into understanding the psychology of smoking, or was even attempted.
- The pharmacology was completely ignored.
- The hysterical lobbying generated big advertising bucks. So now anti-smoking is entrenched, without any rational thought applied to the basics.
Result, failure, and crime. Sound familiar?
Changing the policy requires clear thinking. This is the millstone. Problem-solving and policymaking are barely on speaking terms most of the time. Policy is usually just a way of taking sides, as opposed to problem-solving. Clear thinking isn’t exactly at plague levels, either.
It’s a lose-lose-lose-lose situation. The way the policies were made guaranteed failure simply because the basics were never considered. None of the problems are solved, criminals are as usual making billions. Smoking issues aren’t being addressed, just “yelled at in theory”, also as usual.
(Actually, it’s interesting that any form of stress relief is usually illegal. Yet another way of guaranteeing human misery, perhaps?)
So, yet again – The problems are solvable, and not being solved. Billions are literally going up in smoke, and you get brochures about how great a policy is.
Wake me up when you’ve got a clue.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
