[NZ] New Zealand's Indigenous people are furious over plans to snuff out anti-smoking laws

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https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/12/06/1217306190/new-zealand-maori-indigenous-people-anti-smoking-law

New Zealand's Indigenous people are furious over plans to snuff out anti-smoking laws

DECEMBER 6, 2023 2:08 PM ET
By Simar Bajaj

The country with arguably the toughest anti-smoking laws in the world is calling for an abrupt about-face.

In December 2022, New Zealand passed pioneering legislation to cut down on smoking: limiting the amount of nicotine in cigarettes to non-addictive levels, slashing the number of retailers that sell cigarettes by 90% and banning anyone born after 2008 from ever buying cigarettes in the country.

For the indigenous Māori and Pasifika populations of about 1.3 million, which have smoking rates of 18% to 20%, three times higher than the European population, the smokefree bill was "a cause for celebration," says Teresa Butler, who is Māori and a member of the Ngāti Porou and Te Arawa tribes — and a former smoker of 28 years. "We were ecstatic, so, so happy."

Prior to colonization, New Zealand's indigenous population had never smoked, according to the government's Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Now, 4,000 Māori and 2,000 Pasifika die every year in New Zealand, and according to research in the New Zealand Medical Journal, cigarettes are responsible for 15% to 25% of these deaths. With cigarettes festering in the country since the 1700s, the legislation promised to help stamp out this scourge.

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[RainCaster]

1. A great article, well worth the read

I have long followed & admired NZ. This is a very disappointing bit of news to me. For those who won't take the time to read all this, it's because of a conservative push in the last election, and money from Big Tobacco.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. Nicotine prohibition would likely fail like other prohibitions

However, there is less attraction to nicotine than to alcohol, cannabis, and other drugs that are more psychoactive. Less incentive to get hooked if it is not a social thing. There is no elevating high with nicotine (not speaking from experience) but there is an increase in stress-tolerance (about 25% above non-smokers) that lasts about as long as between cigarettes consumed by a pack-a-day nicotine addict. The real kicker is that for the nicotine addict feeling a need for a cig, stress-tolerance declines significantly below a non-addicted person's stress-tolerance (which does not go up and down on a 40 minute cycle).

On that basis, it is possible a prohibition on tobacco might snuff out the habit and push it way down lower than all other addictive drugs (cocaine, opioids, meth, alcohol, etc.), prohibitions of which have failed or seem to increase societal misery by condemning addicts to poisoned supplies and lack of treatment.

I'm intellectually opposed to prohibitions, but it would have been interesting to see how the NZ tobacco prohibition might have played out.