Quit smoking or live in the car

[seal_cleaner]

@Ulfreida

I had a friend who quit all his many addictions including crystal meth when he contracted AIDS. This was in the eighties so of course it didn’t save him, but the only thing he could not give up was cigarettes. He was smoking to his final day.

The CDC says nicotine is just as addictive than heroin.

I quit smoking several years ago. My brother has quit many times but goes back to it. We agreed that, were we ever to get a terminal diagnosis, we’d resume smoking.

[Chronos]

Again, it’s not just about getting current smokers to quit. Maybe it’s effective at that, maybe it’s not, but it also helps to prevent new smokers from starting, and that’s also good.

The real problem with sin taxes is that sometimes they are elastic. If you raise the price of a sin to the point where nobody does it, then you don’t have that revenue stream any more, and have to do something else to close the gap.

[nearwildheaven]

@Chefguy

A small rant, if I may. We provide an anonymous backpack lunch program at our local elementary school. At present there are 23 kids who don’t have enough to eat on the weekends, so we provide a stopgap for them by filling a backpack with two lunch meals for the kids to pick up on Fridays. One of those packs always comes back reeking of cigarettes. It’s so bad that the bag has to be left outside for several days and then doused liberally with Lysol before it can be brought into the house. That means that the home it goes to must also smell like an ashtray, which means at least one heavy smoker in the place. I don’t understand a mentality that allows children to go hungry for the sake of buying cigarettes at $7.00/pack.

Does the child also smell like smoke, or do you interact with them?

[Machine_Elf]

@Chronos

Again, it’s not just about getting current smokers to quit. Maybe it’s effective at that, maybe it’s not, but it also helps to prevent new smokers from starting, and that’s also good.

The real problem with sin taxes is that sometimes they are elastic. If you raise the price of a sin to the point where nobody does it, then you don’t have that revenue stream any more, and have to do something else to close the gap.

You don’t just lose the sin tax, you also lose all of the basic economic activity. If everyone stopped smoking right now, there’d be a big unemployment problem in the southeastern US, where most of the country’s tobacco is grown.

[Renee]

@Malthus

The study is based on a survey of exactly 12 current and 12 former smokers, all in the country of Poland, where relationships between the cost of cigarettes and income may vary somewhat from those in the US.

Not sure whether the experiences of 12 former smokers in Poland are really very definitive results for smokers generally.

From the source:

In contrast, this survey, which is (a) larger and (b) based in the US, strongly emphasizes the importance of environment for successful quitting:

Factors Associated With Successful Smoking Cessation in the United States, 2000 - PMC

Of course some people probably are motivated by cost to quit - but as the economics cite made clear, the relationship between price and motivation doesn’t appear to be all that great.

And indeed, such measures provide taxation income - but it is very regressive taxation.

My bad, I just skimmed the abstract. I should not have cited that study.

I think I have trouble imagining that cost has no impact on people’s decision to quit. It’s just completely counterintuitive to me. Obviously, we should also be emphasizing environmental restrictions, but making the habit more expensive still feels like a good thing–it may be a regressive tax, but it’s also a voluntary one.

[Pantastic]

@Sailboat

You can see this in pictures from the trenches of WWI, so many sieges or trapped pockets in WWII, units patrolling the jungles of Viet Nam, wherever: no matter how long and difficult the resupply train is, it’s always more important to somebody to have tobacco than the additional food, fuel, ammunition, or spare parts they could transport instead.

Cigarettes were part of US military rations until 1975, there would be 9-10 cigarettes in each ration pack during WWI-II, and later rations had 4. If you have a few nonsmokers in a unit, it doesn’t take much trading for smokers to get a heavy stockpile. I think other countries were similar though I’m not entirely sure.

[Lemur866]

@Machine_Elf

You don’t just lose the sin tax, you also lose all of the basic economic activity. If everyone stopped smoking right now, there’d be a big unemployment problem in the southeastern US, where most of the country’s tobacco is grown.

Maybe they could all get jobs breaking windows?

[Savannah]

@Machine_Elf

FWIW, I knew a guy who had been hooked on heroin and on cigarettes; he said the cigarettes were harder to quit.

I may not have achieved much in my life, but I’ve had my fiction published in print and I quit smoking cigarettes.

It’s a very, very difficult thing to give up. I still wish I could smoke, even now.

[actualliberalnotoneofthose]

@Renee

Sorry, I disagree. People CAN quit smoking. Lots of people do it. If these people are so poor that they’re living in their car, they’re probably also on Medicaid, so their smoking is likely costing taxpayers further money. Plus smoking makes you less employable–if you’re going into job interviews smelling like smoke, a significant portion of employers are going to pass in favor of someone who doesn’t stink. Is it hard to quit smoking? I’m sure it is. But acting like it’s an insurmountable challenge is bullshit. People need to have some responsibility for their choices.

There are a lot of assumptions in this post. Every sentence is refutable by my observations of the real world.

[MonkeyCat]

@Beckdawrek

Yes, I think maybe that’s good idea to rethink.
How much do smokes cost in California? I think maybe I could quit almost anything if I had to. Have you looked into vaping? Maybe that would be cheaper.

I tried not to respond to this. I really did. Eep.

I respectfully disagree with the notion a person could “get over anything if they had to.” Humans are too similar to uniquely possess strengths most lack. Willpower is only one factor in the struggle to overcome addictions. Willpower might not even be one of the more significantly impacting factors.

I’m not very confrontational, but I still am compelled to express dissatisfaction. I apologize if I stepped on a toe or two.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@Sailboat

This reminds me of something that’s been bugging me for a long time. I first noticed it in war movies, but when one looks at photographs documenting actual events, it appears to be a real-life phenomenon and not simply a creation of Hollywood: troops who are beseiged or otherwise cut off from resupply, even for long periods, always have plenty of cigarettes.

You can see this in pictures from the trenches of WWI, so many sieges or trapped pockets in WWII, units patrolling the jungles of Viet Nam, wherever: no matter how long and difficult the resupply train is, it’s always more important to somebody to have tobacco than the additional food, fuel, ammunition, or spare parts they could transport instead. No matter how long they’ve been surrounded or cut off at Leningrad, Bastogne, Kiev, Corregidor, wherever – even on the three hundredth day of the siege – they may run out of food and ammo, but everyone is still furiously chain smoking – somehow they never seem to run out of tobacco, and you know they’re not saving it for later.

Apparently that’s really a thing – you can find photos of grimy, scarecrow men pinned down in the ruins of Stalingrad who have been hunting rats as the Red Army tightens its ring around them and they’ve got cigarettes dangling from their lips.

It must be a powerful addiction.

Family at home often sent cigarettes, chocolate, and other small luxuries to those fighting the wars. Another popular item, evidently, was books. I have one novel from the World War II era on whose dust jacket is a message urging the reader to send books (or donate to some fund for that, probably). If it’s true that war is mostly monotony punctuated by brief periods of action, then I can see how some recreational reading would have been welcome as a morale booster.