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Is a phase
out of cigarette and smoking tobacco sales justifiable?
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Yes, because:
- Cigarettes have killed 200,000 New
Zealanders.
- Only a ban on sales to adults will protect
young people buying cigarettes.
- Surveys
show that 80% of smokers regret they ever started.
- Smokers
will still be able to obtain nicotine but without smoking.
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Isn’t a
cigarette sales ban a denial of human liberties to smokers?
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No ban on smoking is proposed. Smokers’
choices and freedoms are increased in that access to
safer ways of satisfying nicotine addiction are proposed.
Currently smokers only have access to the most dangerous form of
addictive nicotine, namely in cigarette and tobacco smoke.
Human rights law does not include any inherent right
to buy cigarettes, or to smoke them. Cigarettes are a comparatively
recent invention.
In the 1700s, snuff was the most popular form of
tobacco. Pipes became popular in the 1800s; cigarettes only became
popular in the 20th Century.
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Is SmokeLess proposing a ban on the smoking of tobacco ?
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No. Smoking,
possession of tobacco and growing one’s own would remain legal.
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Is SmokeLess proposing a ban on nicotine?
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No.
Alternative nicotine products would be made available for some years
before and many years after cigarette sales are phased out.
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Is SmokeLess proposing a ban on all sales of tobacco
products?
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No. SmokeLess does not propose a ban on smokeless
tobacco!
- Only
cigarette and smoking tobacco sales will be phased out.
- Nasal
snuff, legal to sell now, will not be banned from sale.
- Oral
snuff, banned from sale now, may be permitted to be sold if
smokers need it to help them stop smoking.
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Isn’t
this playing into the hands of criminals, gangs, and black marketers?
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No. Any black
market can be kept small, thus:
- Before
cigarettes can be phased out, smokers need alternatives. They need
to try these out for themselves. Smokeless nicotine can give a
satisfying nicotine hit.
- Smokers are not going to pay exhorbitant prices for an uncertain supply of
black market cigarettes, if they can get a regular legal nicotine
hit from smokeless tobacco or fast acting addictive nicotine
products 10 or 20 times a day for a few dollars a day from the
corner dairy
- Gangs would be working overtime to kill
4000 black- market smoking customers annually, as the cigarette
trade legally and openly does now.
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Instead, why
not regulate the cigarette manufacturers and their products so they do less damage?
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Regulation
means continuance of smoking for longer. Unregulated cigarettes
currently kill 50% of continuing smokers (over 4000 annually).
Regulated cigarettes from a regulated industry, whether in plain
packaging or not, whether displayed at retail or not, and sold only at
restricted times, might kill 10% to 25% fewer smokers, leaving at least
2000 to die early each year. A sales ban is a more effective approach.
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Why
doesn’t SmokeLess do more to denormalise smoking?
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No other
policy can denormalise smoking faster.
A sales ban of smoking tobacco, and to
some extent asking for it, - removes
societal and government approval for this trade. Publicly calling
for a ban on selling cigarettes, as the Maori Party has done, has
probably already contributed to the denormalisation
of cigarettes. See www.endsmoking.org.nz/polls.htm
Support from mainstream health groups for a phase-out of cigarettes
will further help to denormalise smoking.
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Why
doesn’t government double its expenditure against smoking?
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SmokeLess
backs increased investment in current programmes.
Smokers, however, need more effective policies, such as alternatives to
smoking before finally ending cigarette sales. Even if a doubling
of expenditure doubled the rate of decline in smoking prevalence, it
will still take many decades to phase out smoking. Conventional
policies are working better in some other countries, but in New
Zealand
continued high rates of
smoking and relapse to smoking among those who quit, mean that
smokers’ need for nicotine must be factored into any solution. www.endsmoking.org.nz/casestudy.htm
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If tobacco is
so bad, why not ban all tobacco products at the same time?
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Smokeless
tobacco carries only 5% of the danger of smoking, and can help smokers
shift to a less dangerous way of getting nicotine. If all addictive
tobacco products are banned at once (smoking plus smokeless) then a
strong black market would develop for cigarettes and smoking tobacco,
the sales ban on these products would fail, and the opportunity to
eliminate save 4000 annual deaths from smoking would be lost. www.endsmoking.org.nz/smokersoptions.htm
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