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To ban sales of hand
rolled cigarettes, requires
·
A member’s bill to amend the
Smoke-free Environments, supported by:
·
A doubling of the tax on RYOs for a year before,
·
And, a national Quit campaign for
the month before the sales ban.
The prosecution case for banning RYOs:
guilty as charged:
·
Of
keeping smokers inhaling toxic smoke when the price increases.
Hand rolled cigarettes rolled thin
cost half the price of machine made cigarettes. This blunts tax increases.
RYO smokers continue to smoke.
(see Table 1 www.endsmoking.org.nz/ryotax.htm )
·
Of
being more toxic than manufactured cigarettes.
(See below). They are mostly
smoked without filter, and the filters used are ineffective against toxic
gases.
·
Of
killing about a third of all smokers, and one in six of all Maori deaths.
Smoking causes one third of all
Maori deaths1 and as RYO and manufactured cigarettes are equally
popular among Maori, at least
half of all Maori smoking deaths, that is, one sixth of all Maori deaths, are thus probably
due to smoking RYO cigarettes.
Q. When RYOs
are banned, won’t many RYO smokers simply revert to smoking
manufactured cigarettes?
A.
Correct, but a national Roll-your-own Quit Month can be organized to
get smokers to quit before RYO sales are banned.
In this way thousands can be
organized to quit.
To double the tax on RYOs to prepare the way for a ban on RYOs see www.endsmoking.org.nz/ryotax.htm
The cost of smoking is currently under $4 a day
for RYO smokers. How can this be?
- Smokers from Auckland registering to quit smoking this year
smoked 18 cigarettes a day whether they smoked hand-rolled or machine
made cigarettes. But the RYO smokers purchased half a much
tobacco, and paid half as much for it. (Table 1).
- The
average RYO cigarette was rolled thin; average tobacco weight was
0.36 grams, half the tobacco weight in a machine made cigarette (0.73 g). As both groups were equally
addicted on the Fagerstrom scale, it means
that RYO smokers probably extracted similar amounts of nicotine (and
smoke) from their thin cigarettes. That is, they smoked them twice as
intensively; more of the smoke was inhaled, and less was left to smoulder.
- It follows
that if tax should line up with the risk of each class of tobacco
product, then the tax rate per gram for RYOs
is half what it should be.
- The tax rate
on RYOs needs to double before tax can
decrease smoking prevalence much.
·
Under the
current flat tax per gram of tobacco, tax increases force switching to RYOs and enable smokers to keep smoking and save money. Continuing to smoke may
be fatal.
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