Britain: ‘£10 Licence to Smoke’ Proposed
February 16th, 2008Via: BBC:
Smokers could be forced to pay £10 for a permit to buy tobacco if a government health advisory body gets its way.
No one would be able to buy cigarettes without the permit, under the idea proposed by Health England.
Its chairman, Professor Julian Le Grand, told BBC Radio 5 Live the scheme would make a big difference to the number of people giving up smoking.
But smokers’ rights group Forest described the idea as “outrageous”, given how much tax smokers already pay.
Professor Le Grand, a former adviser to ex-PM Tony Blair, said cash raised by the proposed scheme would go to the NHS.
He said it was the inconvenience of getting a permit – as much as the cost – that would deter people from persisting with the smoking habit.
“You’ve got to get a form, a complex form – the government’s good at complex forms; you have got to get a photograph.
“It’s a little bit of a problem to actually do it, so you have got to make a conscious decision every year to opt in to being a smoker.”
Well, it may not deter people from smoking, but I really don’t have that much of a problem with fees and taxes that makes people who smoke contribute to defray the cost of taking care of them once they start getting terminally ill from their addiction. The other alternative is toss them out to die in the gutter, after all.
Addicted cigarette smokers will pick unfinished cigs out of ashtrays if they’re fiending bad enough, and they’re already forking over ever-increasing piles of cash to sustain their habit. (Speaking of which, has any data come out quantifying the reduction of smokers due to these tax hikes?) No one can seriously think a form and a 10 pound pittance will actually have a real public health effect.
On the other hand, maybe people will eventually get fed up and just start buying things like weed instead (no forms required).
Should government really gain a say over our bodies for the sake of offsetting costs by some minor degree? Sure, it will shift responsibility for some small fraction of the bill for the health care these addicts will need later in life, but the real cost is the precedent laws like this set. What a petty gain compared to the loss.
Unfair though it may be, society should just pay the costs upfront and be comforted that smoking is on it’s way out, and most people prefer to be healthy besides. A line needs to be drawn somewhere for christ’s sake.
When you consider the practical impact, laws like this really only amount to self-righteous bullying and an encroachment on personal autonomy.
Grow your own, it’s that simple.
I’m sick and tired of this demonization of tobacco. Anybody notice that since the anti-smoking nagging and harassment became insufferable and people started quitting smoking in droves that the so-called Obesity Epidemic has taken off? The fact is, nicotine is a powerful appetite suppressant, the only one that works for many people (and they wouldn’t dream of making nicotine inhalers affordable and available over the counter, would they?). So the public has been compelled to replace one bad habit – smoking – with another, overeating. (And furthermore, what about all those compulsive coffee swilling, caffeine-heads…can’t believe thats too good for people’s long term health!).
When are the anal-retentive Health Nazis going to realize that people need vices; its what makes life bearable.
I’m as against cigarette smoking as anyone, but, folks, all this is an excuse to raise a tax under the pretext of health or (as with the carbon footprint taxes) “the environment.” Think: does the British government (or any government!) really give a crap about health when THEY seem to do all THEY can do screw the air, water, food, and top soil???
http://www.somethinghappeninghere.net
A bunch of numb-nuts politicians can’t think of anything useful to do, so they have politicised the smoking tobacco debate. The politicians have performed such a wonderful job of spin it has helped feed the monster of ‘control’. Stand back for a moment and see what the debate is turning us into. ONE GROUP THINKS IT HAS THE RIGHT TO TRY AND CONTROL WHAT ANOTHER GROUP WANTS TO DO.
This is wrong.
Now I’m the first to agree that there are issues with smoking tobacco, but where in the debate have we talked about how tobacco consumption be managed for the best of everyone concerned?
It costs the NHS a lot of money dealing with smoking related illnesses, but no-one has put forward the idea with calculating tobacco duty as being VAT+Costs to the NHS. Surely that’s a very fair response? Well politically that’s not a very good answer. Why? Well the government gets approx 8 billion GBP a year in tobacco duty. (The NHS costs approx 80 billion GBP per year). If we changed the duty on tobacco to be a fair response to NHS costs then the duty on tobacco would go down!
This smoking license is rather stupid on so many levels. All it will do is make the black market on tobacco an even bigger problem than it is today. So putting even more money in the hands of organised crime.
I thought that it was known that most tobacco cancer is driven by phosphate fertilizers which have trace amounts of polonium, which tobacco concentrates. There still would be emphysema, but they could cut down on cancer by growing it differently.