Motueka’s (Very) Grey Market in Tobacco

This story of a Motueka tobacco farmer (hit tip: hefevice) makes me want to take up smoking again so I can buy this guy’s wares. Despite being raided and dragged through the courts, Laurie Jury is maintaining there is nothing illegal about what he’s doing: selling dried, unprocessed tobacco leaf, he says, is not the [...]

Tobacco Taxes

So, the New Zealand government has voted 118-4 to increase the sin tax on tobacco.  The funny thing is, the move was led by the Maori party, whose supporters contain a disproportionate number of smokers who probably don’t want a tax increase, and supported by the centre-right National party, who campaigned on an anti-nanny state platform. [...]

Healthists Say the Darndest Things

From the comments on this post on the dangers of third-hand smoke (bollocks): Smokers should have to urinate in a separate system or something so as not to pollute the earth and harm others. Hat tip: Chris Snowdon.

Tobacco Prohibition

Apparently, almost half of New Zealand want to ban smoking completely: The 2008 Health and Lifestyles Survey compiled nationwide interviews from the Health Sponsorship Council of 1608 people, including 422 smokers, and has just been published in the NZ Medical Journal. It found 49.8 per cent of people agreed cigarettes should no longer be sold in [...]

Smoking is Gay

This video from The Onion is funny, but not too far from the reality of current campaigns (Hat tip: Balko). Many PSAs aim to stigmatize smokers rather than inform people of health risks of smoking. I’ve always hated New Zealand’s Not Our Future campaign for this reason. They’ve just started running some new ads. The [...]

Yandle on Tobacco Regulation

Bruce Yandle, author of the wonderful paper “Bootleggers and Baptists: The Education of a Regulatory Economist,” applies the logic of that paper to FDA regulation of tobacco in the latest issue of The Freeman: No, there is no evidence to suggest that tobacco has until now been “an industry that has gone basically unregulated.” But [...]

Government Waste I Support, Relatively Speaking

Michael Marlow has a very good paper in Regulation questioning the effectiveness of tobacco control spending: In 2007, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (cdc) released a report detailing “best practice” spending recommendations for state tobacco control programs. According to the report, “Research shows that the more states spend on comprehensive tobacco control programs, [...]

Anti-Nannyists Roundtable

Watch Jon Caldara, Radley Balko, David Martosko, David Harsanyi, and Andrew Boucher discuss nanny-statism on PBS:

Stigmatizing Smokers

I have a post up at Fr33agents.com in which I complain about the bigotry of the anti-smoking movement. Excerpt: Tobacco control advocates are often quite candid about their intentions. The California Department of Health Services in 1998 described its tobacco control strategy as an attempt ‘to push tobacco use out of the charmed circle of normal, [...]

Smoking Bans and Norms

Henry Farrell has an excellent post at Crooked Timber on smoking bans and public norms: I haven’t seen any research on this (if someone knows of any, let me know in comments), but my best guess in the absence of good evidence would be that the success of the ban reflected instabilities in previously existing [...]