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More Smokers Quit After Big Hike in California Tobacco Tax (today.ucsd.edu)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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[–] 3 points 8 months ago (6 children)

I feel lucky to live in a place where this black market existed for ages before prices went up lol, it's mostly chill, old granny-looking vendors just trying to make a buck. Border patrol gets countered the same way it always was, either corruption, agricultural drones, or both, and it probably helps a lot we grow a bunch of our own tobacco.

Like if it didn't go completely untaxed I'd rather have a black market than a market where big tobacco gets even richer.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    In my opinion if it was just a crop like zucchini and you just had to meet agricultural standards, manage exposure to things like e. coli, get the product tested occasionally for heavy metals, and so on, it would be much better. Making it illegal doesn't work, regulating it out of existence doesn't work, but dealing with the harms from the other end, setting up programs for getting people off addictive things and using the health system etc, seems much better. I really think getting rid of the control and access these massive tobacco companies have and which was built directly off slavery and genocide would be a good idea.

    The price for a 20 packet of cigarettes here in Australia is around $42 in AU dollars, so about $29. The production price is closer to $5, or about $4 USD. All the rest of that is taxes and that means you as a black market producer can make something for $5 and sell it for $30 and make $25 in profit, or you can sell way more at $20 or $15 and still make massive amounts of profit. You could kill the cartels and gangs tomorrow by dropping the tax and it would reduce the market for illegal tobacco to zero. The fact that our government don't is a good indicator that they don't actually care.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    The problem is not the quality, it's that the practice of combustion and inhalation causes cancer.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Is that meant as a sort of joking, the smoking causes the cancer thing? I mean, yes, we all know smoking causes cancer, that isn't being debated. It is more about the effect of taxation on rates of smoking and this type of strategy seems to have the effect of driving black market tobacco, not reducing smoking.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Yeah I probably should've specified "grey" market, something that is sorta controlled for all the shit in the soil and plants, that'd be decent. Smokers though, I don't get them. Pouches are already cheaper even when they come from big companies and you don't stink, don't inhale smoke, and don't ruin your teeth and nails, maybe get cancer down the line bc of the stuff that interacts with your saliva and that's it.

    Russian invasion had a silver lining by getting people to boycott a lot of companies, big tobacco included, but it's still massive. I wonder if there will be tobacco wars like in the old days of the british empire in my lifetime sometimes, not because war is cool but because tobacco is so destructive in more ways than one.

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