New Zealand: Smokers support increased tobacco tax (and head shrinking), national survey says.

On August 9, 2010, in Opinion, by HeavyD

Don't stand between him and his e-cigs!

Very interesting. But ask yourself this – as taxes on cigarettes mount and governments come to rely on these taxes to manage their budgets, what is the likelihood that smoking cessation will honestly be pursued? Whenever a government is funded on the act of smoking it will do what it can to keep that funding source open and increasing.

Can you honestly imagine politicians actively campaigning against earmarked budgets and bloated pork barrel spending? Now can you imagine them working actively to reduce their budgets, their perks, salaries and slush funds? That is exactly what would happen if the smoking cessation programs did their job. So what is the sinister game here? Big Tobacco has conned governments into relying on the smokers’ taxes to keep their budget addictions running.

The clever sleight of hand by Big Tobacco has placed government’s survival at odds with its citizenry’s health. This deeply disturbing and wickedly sinister. What we need is an accounting of all the taxes paid from cigarette sales, revenue allocated toward cessation programs and the incremental change in smoking numbers. One would expect that over time, the revenues would drop as the programs took effect. But that is not the case. So what gives?

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Dr N Wilson, Department of Public Health, University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand; nick.wilson@otago.ac.nz

* Accepted 23 July 2009

Increasing the price of tobacco products through tobacco taxation is one of the most effective tobacco control interventions.1 An additional benefit is that a “dedicated tobacco tax” (where some or all of the revenue raised is earmarked for specific spending or programmes) can generate revenue for funding other tobacco control and health programmes.2 3 Should dedicated tobacco taxes be introduced, it will be useful for decision makers to know whether there is support from all sociodemographic categories of smokers. Accordingly, we aimed to examine smoker support for tobacco taxes by an individual level measure of deprivation.

Read the full article here:

As part of the New Zealand arm of an international study (the International Tobacco Control (ITC) project),4 5 we surveyed a national sample of 1376 New Zealand adult (18+ years) smokers (between March 2007 and February 2008)