Under the Counter Cigarettes - Bad for consumers in its present form

princess*daisy

Urgh great, now the government is policing what we are able to see. Shield your eyes, god forbid you might know what a packet of cigarettes looks like!

What next? The sound police? Will all TV adverts for alcohol and junk food have to be silent? Will it be an offence to mention sherry in front of a child? The thought police? If we look like we're tempted to smoke a cig, will we end up in the cells for a night? Community service for looking longingly at an Eccles cake?

Ridiculous.

jamespir

its silly that they feel the need to hide them away i dont smoke but i have no problem with anyone else doing it i know lots of people do get ill from smoking but its their choice to smoke and it should not be down to anyone else to say otherwise

hemophobic

renegade wrote: »

I am pleased that this new law will not affect me, I have stopped smoking Fags and discovered vaping, cheaper no damage to health, no 2nd hand smoke, cleaner and you still get the buzz.:j

Same here 3 weeks today! It wasn't the cost, but my health I stopped for. Although I would have been rather annoyed at the recent price increases.

I don't see how the doors will affect anything though, when I started smoking I didn't go to the shop and just pick a brand, I started smoking what my dad did. I was too young to buy cigs then anyway.

And about the plain packaging - will all cigarettes be the same? I would hate that if they weren't L&B and I still smoked lol.

getzls

Smoking didn't kill about 10 of my friends aged between 32 and 48, drink did. Figures are put out refering to the number of deaths through smoking, also by cirrhosis. Of course the smoking related deaths are much higher. None of my friends died from cirrhosis, most dropped dead from heart attacks. Drink still killed them but these will not be in the offical figures.

CKhalvashi

Surely it’s against some law to not be able to ask for a quote before sale?

CK

phoneguy

Smoking = madness. This is a money saving forum, how could anyone advocate setting fire to money???!!!

spadoosh

anatomical wrote: »

I think with the amount of information out there on the side effects of smoking anything that discourages it is a positive. I accept that people have free will and choose to smoke, but if the health warnings, tv adverts and general knowledge of the public aren't enough to discourage people then maybe a bit of inconvenience will.

Having seen and studied the effects of smoking throughout the course of my degree, anything that discourages smoking is a good thing. While parliament generally won't do anything to discourage the consumer, the amount of money spent in healthcare because of smoking far outweighs the amount of tax the government gets from the sale of cigarettes. One in five deaths in the UK are caused by smoking, I think it would irresponsible of the government not to introduce more measures like this.

For those saying alcohol/fatty foods etc. should also be locked away, maybe they will be in future. At the moment there is research to suggest that drinking a sensible amount of alcohol can actually decrease your chances of getting certain illnesses, as with most things it is drinking to excess that causes problems. Cigarettes have no positive effects so it is more important to discourage smoking than drinking alcohol at the present.

Lol post of the day!!

C'mon supply some facts with this please. Two outlandish statements there. The second i think i can disprove straight away seeing as only 1 in 6 people smoke in the uk.

The average smoker probably puts in £45000 in a shortish lifetime in tax through fags. Of which, now this is a guesstimation but id say a quarter of those (at least) who die suffer heart failure and as such die instantly without any burden on the state, obviously you can look at passive smoking etc but seeing as its illegal to do indoors and the amount of air in the atmosphere that nullifies smoking i very much doubt (personal opinion) passive smoking is a major issue anymore none worse than carbon emissions, fuel plants, bbq's etc etc.

No need for it, people are being priced out of smoking, no need to hide it aswell. All we will see is tobacco sales plummet and traffic through dover increasing.

spadoosh

phoneguy wrote: »

Smoking = madness. This is a money saving forum, how could anyone advocate setting fire to money???!!!

Do i need to go into lifestyle choices and luxury goods?!

No one advocates setting fire to money. And for that matter no one is advocating smoking. You are advocating not smoking, your opinion means nothing to people who don't know you, sooner you realise this the sooner you will realise you are wasting your time with posts like this.

Has MSE become a non smoking website?! I missed that in the forum rules 'smokers need not apply'

unholyangel

EycplUK wrote: »

I feel that putting cigarettes out of sight will help, if not for this generation but the next. Think of the saying "out of sight, out of mind". If the younger generation grow up with no advertising of cigarettes, do not see their presence in every supermarket, do not see people smoking in restaurants and public places then it becomes less of a normal habit and less people will be inclined to take up smoking in the future.

They'll still see parents/family/friends smoking at home and outside work places/restaurants/bars etc. When I started smoking, it wasnt because I saw them in the shops! In fact, I had no clue where you got them - even though they were on prominent display. It was due to family and friends smoking. Its a impressionable mind thing, the people you like do it so you end up doing it. Not peer pressure, just...a growing process i guess. If they really want to stop the next generation smoking, imo they're going to have to make it illegal to smoke in front of anyone below the age of 21.

Thankfully I've gave up now. Utterly amazing how much you can save.

Although I have to say, people who worry about the odd bit of passive smoking yet think nothing of the thousands of cars that may drive past them every day, chemicals in things, sitting in the sun cooking their skin all day..............well to me its illogical.

Its as bad as the government telling us to reduce our carbon footprint, perhaps by not using our car so much or turning off the engine when sitting for longer than 30 seconds etc while they're allowing more and more airports to be built along with roads etc.

Also telling us to turn off a light every time we leave a room - even for a few minutes - to conserve energy when you have cities lit up and have government buildings leaving their lights on overnight. Do as I say and not as I do eh?

Oh and dont forget to protect the environment! But please don't notice that we're destroying acres of woodland to build more shops like the ones just half a mile down the road (by "like the ones" i mean the exact same shops.....just a different branch).

Their blatant hypocrisy astounds me.

anatomical

^^So should we just give up then? Not even attempt to make anything better, because someone elsewhere will be doing the opposite?

spadoosh wrote: »

Lol post of the day!!

C'mon supply some facts with this please. Two outlandish statements there. The second i think i can disprove straight away seeing as only 1 in 6 people smoke in the uk.

The average smoker probably puts in £45000 in a shortish lifetime in tax through fags. Of which, now this is a guesstimation but id say a quarter of those (at least) who die suffer heart failure and as such die instantly without any burden on the state, obviously you can look at passive smoking etc but seeing as its illegal to do indoors and the amount of air in the atmosphere that nullifies smoking i very much doubt (personal opinion) passive smoking is a major issue anymore none worse than carbon emissions, fuel plants, bbq's etc etc.

No need for it, people are being priced out of smoking, no need to hide it aswell. All we will see is tobacco sales plummet and traffic through dover increasing.

From the Tobacco Atlas, a global study of the economic and health impact of tobacco, "smoking cost the UK $9584 million in 2008, and between 2003-2008 4.6% of healthcare expenditure was on smoking related illnesses." "44.9% of UK children between the ages of 13-15 are exposed to second hand smoke in the home".

Taken from "The effects of increasing tobacco taxation: a cost benefit and public finance analysis". "In 2006 £2.7 billion was spent by the NHS on treatment of smoking-related illnesses in England". "The equivalent figure in Wales was around £400 million". If tobacco tax were to be increased and therefore decrease smoking rates there would be "output gains due to reduced mortality. The fact that people live longer implies they will have a higher probability of surviving and being in work till the average age of retirement. Therefore, a reduction in smoking prevalence would result in output gains due to reduced mortality". "There is evidence that smokers are more prone to absenteeism from work than non-smokers. As more people stop smoking, their output would increase due to reduced absenteeism". "Smoking is associated with increased ill-health in the population as well as increased mortality. We estimate the reduction in expenditure on benefits for people of working age with long-standing health conditions (such as employment and support allowance and disability living allowance) which would result from a reduction in smoking".

From patient.co.uk "Finding a job may be more difficult as employers know that smokers are more likely than non-smokers to have sick leave. More than 34 million working days (1% of total) are lost each year because of smoking-related sick leave."

From cancerresearchuk.org "It is estimated that one in two regular cigarette smokers will eventually be killed by their tobacco habit, half of these in middle age. 36 Over the last 50 years, it is estimated that 6.5 million Britons have died from tobacco-related diseases.6 If current smokers can be encouraged to quit, mortality during the first half of the twenty-first century will be reduced: discouraging young people from starting to smoke will reduce smoking-related deaths during the middle or second half of the twenty-first century".

From the ASH fact sheet http://www.ash.org.uk/files/documents/ASH_95.pdf. Cigarettes are the leading cause of fatal accidental fires in the home. "Reduced smoking results in a net annual benefit of £1.7 billion, in addition to tobacco tax revenue".

You cannot simply quantify costs to the UK and NHS by money alone, and simply comparing the revenue from cigarette tax in one year to the money spent by the NHS in that particular year is not accurate. Smoking related illnesses do not affect people immediately so to analyse figures on a year by year case is not accurate.

I would like to see your facts please. Unless it only me who has to supply facts and you are allowed to "guesstimate" as you please. Just because 1 in 6 people smoke now, it does not mean that only that many are going to have smoking related healthcare issues currently, as many people have been smoking for years and these illnesses are only presenting themselves now. Cancers can take decades to appear so do not correlate directly with smoking figures.