Labour’s attempted crackdown on smokers would have delivered criminal groups a near-monopoly over the cigarette trade.
‘Make no mistake, denicotisation would have effectively banned cigarettes as we know them. A 95% reduction in nicotine would have been like swapping out beer for kombucha, and smokers craving real cigarettes would turn to the black market,’ said ACT MP Todd Stephenson in a statement.
‘Normalising interactions between ordinary New Zealanders and organised criminals is about as dumb a plan as we could imagine, and yet that’s what Labour was proposing.
‘It’s been disappointing to see the media buy into the nonsense arguments pushed by professional nanny statists. Their hatred of the tobacco industry has led them to a dangerous and illogical place.
‘They argue that, because concerns about the black market have previously been mentioned by tobacco companies, we should dismiss any such concerns entirely, no matter who raises them, no matter how serious and warranted those concerns clearly are.
‘Bhutan banned the sale of tobacco products in 2004 and has spent the last 17 years fighting a booming black market, with disastrously high smoking rates. In Australia, political efforts to price smokers out of the habit have fuelled a crime wave of firebombings and and gang murders linked to the illegal tobacco trade.
‘The latest claim from Health officials is that New Zealand’s black market is shrinking. Clearly they haven’t spoken with Customs officials who just this month warned of a significant and concerning uptick in seizures of smuggled tobacco, concealed in sea cargo, stuffed into roofing frames and gypsum board.
‘The evidence is staring us in the face that sophisticated criminal enterprises have already developed around smuggled tobacco. Why would we want to make these enterprises even more profitable?
‘ACT’s coalition agreement committed to repealing Labour’s prohibitionist legislation, and we applaud the Associate Health Minister for shepherding this repeal through Parliament while under fire from a frenzied opposition and media.’
Image credit: Elsa Oloffson
Ah yep. Prohibition once again.
It’s never worked, it simply always creates a black market run by gangsters.
Unfortunately communists never read history, if they did then they wouldn’t be communists obviously.
This was one of the few Labour policies I actually approved of. A close family member died as a result of smoking. yes their choice but like its addictive, like the so called illegal drugs that don’t come with generous lobbyists.
The tobacco industry is a menace and if it were any other product that was so harmful it would have been banned years ago. Trust the losers in ACT to play the tobacco lobby stooges on the flimsy premise of organised crime. Total bull****.
Critical thinking is not one of your streghts.
Empty criticism isn’t a response….do you want to pay tax for all the people who will end up in cancer wards…because that’s what your alleged critical thinking represents….
And of course that would have nothing to do with rise of dairy and service station robberies since Turia started down this road. She said it was about helping Maori youth but all it has done is put more of them in jail for unnecessary criminal offences…!
Oh and that wouldn’t have anything to do with poverty driven by the scamdemic…? Cherry picking much?
Nice segue but no cigar..! 😂
Grow your own tobacco. Pretty easy and fun to get the taste right.
I used to think tobacco is awful and should be banned and then i came across what they put in normal cigarettes and whats NOT in natural organic tobacco. Tobacco was used by several cultures for thousands of years without any indication that caused excess deaths. Do you think maybe the chemical process they put through the tobacco and roll it into a cigarette might have something to do with it?
Now let’s apply the same argument to cannabis prohibition, which is one of the worst ideas humanity has ever come up with.