Marijuana advocates racked up big wins across the country Tuesday, as voters in California, Nevada, and Massachusetts approved recreational pot use and voters in Arkansas, Florida, and North Dakota gave the green light to medical cannabis.
A recreational marijuana measure was also leading in Maine, and a medical marijuana initiative was ahead in Montana.
The only state where marijuana decisively lost: Arizona, where voters rejected recreational legalization. Medical marijuana remains legal in the state.
Re: California. Anti-smoking taxes are not a “health” measure, they are a punitive measure against people with addictions, and all this will do is send more people across the line into poverty — because true addicts will pay for their addictions first before anything else. I was a smoker for 43 years and can guarantee you that price hikes were not a factor in quitting, but it doesn’t seem like the voices of people like me are ever given any weight by the anti-smoking fanatics.
Wrong. I know many people who quit smoking because of the cost. As a matter of fact, for most people, it was the number one reason.
Nicotine is extremely addicting and while some people will prioritize paying for it above all else, a great deal of research shows that in the age group of 12-17 year old people, raising prices will prevent many from starting smoking. It also shows that in a region where taxes on cigarettes increase, total number of cigarette sales decrease proportionally. There are some nice tables and summaries at https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/research/factsheets/pdf/0146.pdf.
While these measures may not influence every smoker, it does provide a secondary reason to never start, quit, or reduce cigarette smoking, and indirectly improve the health of many.
DC, you are still not saying anything to justify the punitive approach towards the people with serious addiction. Let’s see that same research as it applies to someone with a 20-year 3-pack-a-day habit. Or do we just throw our hands up and say, “Oh well, they’re a lost cause anyway”? As to teenagers, I’m not sure how that research came to its conclusions, because most people in the age group you mentioned are not able to purchase cigarettes. Possibly there is an indirect effect if they are cadging, stealing, or buying their cigarettes from older friends, siblings, or parents who are reducing their purchases, hiding their stash, or sharing less due to rising costs. Also, I’m not really accepting any (recent) research showing a connection between raising cigarette prices and the number of people quitting unless the research has taken into account the additional factor of large numbers of people in the last several years who have quit smoking by using e-cigs, which have become popular roughly around the same time as the cigarette tax hikes. Who knows whether e-cig use is the explanation for the recent decrease in cigarette sales or whether it is (purportedly) the rise in prices? And how many of those people who “quit” were only smoking a few cigarettes a day, not really serious smokers in the first place? For those who really care about getting people to quit, I would like to see further (non-knee-jerk “I hate tobacco companies”) research into the comparable safety of e-cigs vs. cigarettes, and while you’re at it, it might be a good idea to throw marijuana into the mix, as to both economic and health effects, as it will probably be cheaper to buy marijuana than tobacco in the near future given the recent trend in marijuana legalization. Also, for the younger potential smokers, maybe it would be better to start a new “If you care, don’t share” campaign directed at smokers with children, younger siblings and friends, instead of the same old ineffective “We try to scare, you don’t care” approach. 🙂