Taxxing won't do anything because structurally the Rich have the most power in the system. The only way to fix this is to systematically remove the Rich through whatever means and remove the means which enables them to exist.

Planet? Don't include the mice and dolphins in the way the homo sapiens do their shit.

Boomers are having a temper tantrum in their death throes by elections these Conservatives.

But think of the savings. Early death means budget surplus from hospice saved. /s

Can someone that still has a twitter ask Dan Patrick to take one for the economy here?

They just had an election and the government flipped from centre-left to centre-right. It could just be the classic conservative “our position is whatever is the opposite of the left!”

Big tobacco doesn't really need cigarette sales anymore. They are all in on vape brands, where they can sell the liquid at ink-jet prices to customers for a huge markup at $6500 per liter. That's why you see vape shops on each street corner. The distribution is all streamlined. The website talks to the DHL warehouse about what stock is available, customers can subscribe to weekly delivery plans and the warehouse is filled by some factory in china.

Hard to say because they are very sneaky. We do know that Big tobacco ran a fake grassroots campaign with an imaginary dairy owner front man. ("Dairy" is the New Zealand name for corner shops/ drugstores)

Tagging you @AnAngryAlpaca - they may not need it but their greed didn't get the memo.

They have actually admitted this is going to be revenue gathering. NZ has some of the highest tobacco tax in the world.

Basically their election promise was tax cuts, which they intended to do by allowing more foriegn ownership of real estate and taxing it.

After the election they found out they could only govern with the help of a populist party and a libertarian party.

The populists won't allow more foriegn ownership of real estate. Meanwhile the libertarians' wet dream is stuff like more ~~lung cancer~~ tobacco.

So we get shitty last minute law changes we didn't see coming, like this one.

It's worse than that as it's short term tax gains now but increased public health spending later from those same taxes when they start getting cancer in a decade or two.

When you elect the clowns of conservative/neoliberal politics, you get what you deserve — a circus.

Tax revenue that you'll have to plow right back into the health care system to treat expensive lung cancers. But hey, that's only 20 years down the line, so you look good now.

Yup. It's really effective. I've paid my share of lung ruining tax in my lifetime. And for most of that time I'd be happy to defend my right to soil my airways to something close to the death.

I've been clean for over a year. But that addiction is so fucking emotional that you let them squeeze you dry and you almost applaud it. The perfect capitalist drug.

I've always supported this approach too but I have to wonder... is there a point where it gets taxed so high that people will just go back to the black market? What would prevent anyone from going black (heh) if it's cheaper than the legal option?

I think governments should always ban everything they don't like. Next up: alcohol, candy and snacks. Then maybe bars, motor sports and sex for unmarried people.

It makes perfect sense. Cigarettes are cancer death machines in an addictive package. They should be banned. However, we've learned from hard experience that making addictive drugs harder to get just leads to addicts trying even harder to get them. So what's a practical solution? Grandfather in the current addicts and try like hell to keep everyone else away from it.

Equality doesn't come in to this. You do not, in fact, need to protect people's right to addictive cancer sticks.

Banning it for existing addicts is tough and can be cruel. Stopping new addicts is easy and a gift for life

Nope. @Landsharkgun is right. Zealand already has some of the highest tobacco taxes in the world. Tobacco is incredibly expensive here.

What happens is the addicts spend all their money on insanely expensive tobacco and their kids go hungry.

These laws came after years and years of rising prices, massive taxation, plain packs with disgusting health warnings, free nicotine patches and free gum for anyone who wants to quit.

It has been working too. Our smoking rates are way down.

I'm really disappointed that we did the hard yards on this and now these turkeys are going to dismantle over a decade's worth of work and bring a whole new generation into lung cancer land.