Smoking Bans

"Everything is poison. It is the dose that determines whether it kills you or not."

Hence why therapeutic index is important. There is no point in saying that "X should be banned" because it is dangerous because even water is toxic in sufficient levels. And there's no point in talking about "X drug is safer than Y drug" either without knowing their therapeutic index because at the end of the day, everything is poison.

edited 22nd Aug '12 6:15:39 PM by IraTheSquire

Honestly, I think all smoking is bad (moreso for the health of myself and those I care most about instead of just everyone's health overall), but I also think anyone and everyone who wants to smoke should be allowed to do so. Because of this and the fact that I tend to be sensitive to/overreact to someone smoking nearby (or smelling smoke in the car, or while a grill is going, or even where there may be no smoke at all), I try to rush out as calmly and politely as possible (well, at least a lot more calmly than I used to) and come back inside when I think it's a bit airier.

I felt bad for that one troper who wasn't able to offer another troper a drink and a smoke to cheer 'em up, though. That seemed like such a nice gesture.

That's because it was. If someone offers you a drink/smoke, they are generally trying to be hospitable and gracious. The polite thing to do is to say, "Well, I don't drink/smoke but thanks anyway" or something similar.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that smokers/drinkers are rude in general.

Thread Hop:

I remember there was a move to put plain packaging on packets here.

Now, I am pretty anti-cigarette, but this is not a good move. If packets were plain, then you would not be able to tell the difference between legit and fake packs. And that is much more dangerous.

Yes, sadly cigarettes are one of the single most counterfeited items. Unlike a lot of other products, they do need to be protected from people faking them. Especially since a lot of the fakes have dangers above and beyond normal cigarettes.

I'm going to break my own principles here and say that, as far as I'm concerned, if you're going to do something that's inherently unhealthy anyway, it strikes me as ridiculous that you would expect protection from even unhealthier versions of the unhealthy thing that you're already doing.

Granted that you ought to know if someone is spiking your generic cigarette with bleach or something, but that's a concern for any consumer product and one that requires government regulation to manage, as "free markets" are helpless to deal with counterfeiting in this sense.

Is it hypocrisy to invoke negative liberties with respect to being allowed to smoke, but then cry positive liberties in terms of government protecting the safety of the product you're smoking?

edited 30th Aug '12 8:21:15 AM by Fighteer

And honestly, I think that's a rather callus position to hold. Once again, we need to stop treating smoking like it's some sort of moral failing, and start recognizing that they're addicts.

Saying "Well, they're poisoning themselves anyways, who cares if they die faster" isn't productive in the slightest.

I wasn't intending to make that argument as such. Of course regulations need to be in place to ensure that even if people are smoking, their cigarettes are as safe as can be given that they are inherently unhealthy to begin with.

I just don't see how packaging helps with that.

I think the argument is that plain packaging is easier to replicate for counterfeiters.

edited 30th Aug '12 9:06:48 AM by Medinoc

It's like any other form of branding. Most counterfeit cigarettes that try to replicate brand packaging tend to do it poorly, which alerts consumers. If you remove brand packaging, and force cigarettes to be packaged in plain or drab colored boxes, then it makes it easier to pass off counterfeits as legitimate, and smokers won't know until they light up.

Edit: What Medinoc said.

edited 30th Aug '12 9:07:45 AM by DrunkGirlfriend

I admit that I don't smoke and so the issue is moot to me, but I have never heard of a counterfeit cigarette sold in a legitimate store. How are these fake smokes supposedly reaching consumers? More often I hear about tax fraud where cigarettes will be sold with fake tax stamps. But even that hardly ever makes the news.

edited 30th Aug '12 9:12:16 AM by Fighteer

Believe it or not, but there's a fairly large black market for tobacco. Sometimes you see them in small mom-and-pop style stores, sometimes it's a dude in a bar who "got a really good deal on some Camels, do you want some?"

edited 30th Aug '12 9:15:18 AM by DrunkGirlfriend

Okay, so someone who voluntarily buys such "fell off the back of the truck" goods deserves what he/she gets. I'm totally willing to let the free market operate there. If you're going to be Too Dumb to Live voluntarily, you get what you deserve.

Which is not to say that such operations shouldn't be prosecuted when discovered, but come on, people. Grow a brain.

Yeah, but at the same time, that's the addiction talking. Tobacco is like any other addictive drug. When people need a fix, all reason and logic go right out the window. It's like the people who complain about the clean needle programs because "heroin junkies deserve to get HIV if they're dumb enough to use a dirty needle".

Offering clean needles as an alternative to dirty ones is not a waste of time as it helps the junkies not get infectious diseases while they (ideally) try to clean up. As smoking is not illegal and does not carry a risk of transmitting an infectious disease (well, unless you're swapping cigs with people), the situations are not analogous.

It's more like the government offering a program to sell heroin of known quality and purity as an alternative to street drugs. Which I'm entirely for, of course, but if such a program is available and you kill yourself with bad street drugs anyway, well, too bad.

edited 30th Aug '12 9:39:54 AM by Fighteer

I just go to the Indian Reservations and buy cartons there. No prohibitive taxation and a wide selection.

That's where a lot of the "fallen off the truck" variety of cigarettes come from. People buy tons and tons of cartons from Indian reservations, and then resell them for a significant profit, either by the pack or by the carton. They are the same cigs and everything, just without all the taxes. There's been all sorts of fights between the govt and the tribes regarding the issue, but the tribes don't budge much since it's a major revenue source for them.

^

Well if the "known purity and quality" drugs are triple the price of the street drugs, that's your fucking problem right there. You need to be able to undercut the underworld for such programs to work. Which is easy, because street products have a monopoly if the official versions are prohibitively expensive(artificially, via taxation and not production costs) or are outright illegal.

edited 30th Aug '12 9:42:22 AM by Barkey

Saying "if such a program is available and you kill yourself with bad street drugs anyway, well, too bad" doesn't take into account the fact that tobacco is expensive. It's the primary reason why counterfeit cigarettes primarily impact the poor.

Also, you can get infectious diseases from cigarettes if you're one of the extremely poor who go digging through garbage cans looking for butts to smoke, or who are okay with bumming a puff off someone with a lit cigarette. It's not as likely as getting something from a dirty needle, but there are some things you can get from saliva.

edited 30th Aug '12 9:44:52 AM by DrunkGirlfriend

Look, all this seems to focus on the problem that "legitimate" cigarettes are more expensive than black market ones. Which is something that is not going to change as long as vice taxes exist, and labeling is not going to help or hinder the process. A person looking for cheap cigarettes but who insists on brand loyalty and therefore only buys "Marlbooros" from the guy in the bar is... well, a subspecies of human that quite frankly deserves whatever it gets. I am not budging on this point.

That's also ignoring the fact that they do get sold in stores sometimes, often being passed off as the legitimate thing.

Also, I'm not sure what you're getting at by the hypothetical smoker who insists on brand loyalty. Most smokers I know will smoke whatever's cheapest. They usually have a preference, sure, but when push comes to shove, they'll smoke whatever they can get. Again, see the fact that the extremely poor will smoke other people's butts out of ashtrays.

You can't expect someone in that position to make good decisions about their addiction.

I also highly disagree that making poor decisions about addiction makes someone a "subspecies of human". Quite frankly, it's insulting and doesn't help anyone.

edited 30th Aug '12 10:04:45 AM by DrunkGirlfriend

If that's your premise, then how will distinct labeling affect their decision making process? You just said it doesn't — they smoke whatever's cheapest.

And look, addiction to the point where it robs someone of higher brain functions is a serious disease that taxes and labeling won't even begin to address. Barkey isn't that sort of person, or at least I hope he isn't. I doubt that anyone posting here is.

edited 30th Aug '12 10:08:21 AM by Fighteer

Actually, yes, they probably are that sort of person. Drunkscriblerian is pretty intelligent, but when he was unemployed and we couldn't afford cigarettes, he did stoop to digging butts out of the ashtray outside the bar. If a "friend" had said "Hey, you're a friend of mine, I'll sell you a pack of Pall Malls for cheap, because I hate to see you like this" that he could afford I don't doubt for a second that he would have bought them if he believed they were actual cigarettes. And he's not the only smoker that I know, for a fact, that reached that level of desperation while unemployed.

Most smokers, even at that level of desperation, don't want to gamble on whether or not their cigarettes actually contain tobacco, because there's nothing worse than having a nic fit and wasting your money on a paper tube full of rat turds and sawdust. However, counterfeits are almost always passed off as legitimate cigs, and drab packaging makes it harder to identify fakes until after the purchase is made.

edited 30th Aug '12 10:18:36 AM by DrunkGirlfriend

But then the obvious conclusion is that a person acting in such a manner is not rational where their habit is concerned, and as such, their judgement is impaired and should not be relied on as far as having a voice in policy decisions. It should be taken into account only to the degree that it affects the likely success or failure of any such policy.

So, how many times do I have to say that counterfeits are always passed off as legitimate smokes? Always.

It's never "Hey, I have some counterfeit cigarettes here, want some?" It's always "Hey, this gas station has cheaper cigarettes, I'll buy them here." or "Hey, a friend of mine cut me a deal on some smokes". Then they find out they're fakes.

It's the same reason why people buy knock-off handbags. Nobody wants to buy a fake Coach purse. They want a real Coach purse at a discount.

Likewise, nobody wants to buy fake cigarettes (that may or may not contain actual tobacco), they want to buy real cigarettes at a discount. Shoddily replicated packaging is usually the primary indicator of counterfeits, if you make all the packages plain, then you take away that indicator.

I've never dug smokes out of ashtrays, and I do have particular loyalty to two or three specific flavors, and will grudgingly smoke other things. I won't buy some sort of funky backroom cigs with weird shit in them, but as I mentioned, I will buy them tax free off an indian reservation for about 50 percent of what I buy them for at a gas station, with absolutely no problems there.

And wow Fighteer, I'm definitely going to remember that subspecies of human remark the next time you go all cranky and liberal about some subset of people I feel fit to watch get destroyed because I take a dislike to them.(Which I'll freely admit isn't a strawman, there are groups out there that I'd have no problem watching die in a fire.)

But seriously, that's a comment I expect from me, not from most of the people here.