Taxes are bad for you....

Francesca Cornaglia from the University of London will speak at the Australian National University in Canberra today to challenge several policies aimed at reducing the harm associated with smoking.

Dr Cornaglia has measured cigarette exposure by examining the level of a by-product of nicotine, called coniine, found in saliva.

She says smokers may buy fewer cigarettes when the price goes up, but they inhale more deeply or smoke more of the cigarette to ensure nicotine levels in the body remain constant.

"When that happens, the filter doesn't really work for the second half of the cigarette as good as it does for the first half because it has already absorbed tar and substances," she said.

"So the second half of the cigarette actually gets filtered less properly than the first half."

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Abstract:     
This paper analyses the compensatory behavior of smokers. Exploiting data on cotinine concentration - a metabolite of nicotine - measured in a large population of smokers over time, we show that smokers compensate tax hikes by extracting more nicotine per cigarette. Our study makes two important contributions. First, as smoking more intensively a given cigarette is detrimental to health, our results question the usefulness of tax increases. Second, we develop a model of rational addiction where agents can also adjust their intensity of smoking and we show that the previous empirical results suffer from severe estimation biases.

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Gus: sure... may be... may be not...

But the combination of ugly packaging, with death printed all over it, and a big tax hike in the mouth might contribute to less smoking, especially with the youth to which the previous glamorous packagings "were not" aimed at... So, some smart people argue that drunken loots are more dangerous than smokers and that could be.... But the health bill to cope with smokers in hospitals is far bigger than those with stupid binges. And I've buried many more young smokers than old drinkers... And I got chronic bronchitis from passive smoking... And I only got pissed ("rarely") from my own indulgence without breathing noxious gases into someone else face, apart from fogging up the windows of a booze bus...

Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says the Coalition will not stand in the way of the Government's anti-smoking plans.

The Government lifted the excise on tobacco at midnight and plans to force cigarette companies to sell their products in plain packs.

Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon says the Government was advised to raise the tobacco tax by 60 per cent but decided on 25 per cent.

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see toon at top...

Meanwhile, studies of migrants between Sweden and Finland, showed that a man's lifetime risk of testicular cancer tends to follow the country he was born in rather than the country where he was brought up. It was his mother's environment when she was pregnant with him, rather than his own as a boy or as an adolescent, that seems to have largely determined a man's risk of testicular cancer.

One of the strongest pieces of evidence in support of this idea comes from studies of people who smoke. A man who smokes typically reduces his sperm count by a modest 15 per cent or so, which is probably reversible if he quits. However, a man whose mother smoked during pregnancy has a fairly dramatic decrease in sperm counts of up to 40 per cent – which also tends to be irreversible.

Professor Sharpe said such findings can be explained by understanding how the first cells of the testes form. Sertoli cells, which in the adult act as guardians for the development of sperm cells, are the very first cells to form from a "genital ridge" of the human male foetus. The number of sperm that can be produced in an adult man is critically dependent on the number of Sertoli cells that develop in his foetus, so anything that interferes with the formation of Sertoli cells in a mother's womb will affect sperm production many years later. "Maternal-lifestyle factors in pregnancy can have quite substantial effects on sperm counts in sons in adulthood, and the most logical mechanism by which this could occur is via reducing the number of Sertoli cells," Professor Sharpe says.

But the key question now is to identify the relevant lifestyle and environmental factors.

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By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

ALBANY — New Yorkers who like to smoke will have to dig a little deeper to light up next month, after the Legislature passed a bill on Monday that will give the state the highest cigarette taxes in the country.

The new law, part of an emergency budget measure to keep the government running, adds another $1.60 in state taxes to every cigarette pack sold starting on July 1, pushing the average price of a pack to about $9.20.

The average price in New York City, which imposes its own cigarette taxes, will be even higher, nearly $11 a pack.

Those who prefer other tobacco products will also be forced to pay significantly more.

The tax on smokeless tobacco will more than double, to $2 an ounce from 96 cents an ounce, starting on Aug. 1. And the wholesale tax on cigars, dips and other kinds of tobacco will rise to 75 percent from 46 percent .

And in what may be the legislation’s most controversial provisions, starting on Sept. 1, the state will begin collecting — or try to collect — taxes on cigarettes sold on Indian reservations to off-reservation visitors, an issue that led to violent protests during the early 1990s.

One Indian chief has said that trying to collect taxes would be considered an act of war.

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Federal [US] health officials on Tuesday released their final selection of nine graphic warning labels to cover the top half of cigarette packages beginning next year, over the opposition of tobacco manufacturers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/health/policy/22smoke.html?_r=1&hp

Meanwhile in Australia an advertising campaign sponsored by the tobacco lobby features a "nanny" — supposedly representing a "nanny-state" — looking like a bulky female prison warden straight out from "Prisoner" (Cell Block H in the US), pinching money from a smoking adult... Good idea. I thought, if nothing else could deter someone from smoking, this image of a large nasty woman in a dark grey uniform and with crooked teeth would do the trick on the packets.

Australian cigarette smokers were hit with a 12.5 percent tax increase on Tuesday, the second tobacco excise tax hike Canberra has leveled against consumers this year. A package of 20 cigarettes now costs AU$35 (US$25) and brand-name smokes are even more dear, at upwards of AU$40 per pack.

Cigarette taxes are a bonanza for the Australian government, which makes about AU$17 billion annually from the levy. However, as taxes rise, so does the black market trade in tobacco. According to the Australian border force, the illegal business is worth more than AU$546 million.

Government officials say they want to discourage the dangerous behavior, and the tax hikes have succeeded in sending the percentage of Australians who smoke down from 20 percent in 2001 to just under 14 percent in 2018. However, cigarette consumption hasn’t necessarily trended downward during that time – it rose in the last quarter of 2017, bucking a lengthy decline.

Some officials want Canberra to do more to encourage vaping, which many health experts believe is less harmful but which remains technically illegal in Australia. While vapes and e-cigarettes can be sold without nicotine, possession and use of nicotine for vaping is banned under nationwide poison regulations. However, a smoker can obtain a prescription for liquid nicotine, a permit to import it for personal consumption – or merely buy it on the black market, which is the most popular method, according to the Daily Mail.

With the new prices, the average pack-a-day smoker is spending an eye-popping AU$12,500 per year on their habit, a hefty sum especially in light of the worldwide economic depression that has followed on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic. Over a million people in Australia lost their jobs in a single month following the imposition of lockdown measures in March, and the strict controls on movement and activity were estimated to be costing the economy AU$4 billion per week.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/499627-australia-cigarettes-taxes-hike/

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