World War Tobacco

Though taxes are an effective way to discourage smoking, they have spawned a massive contraband economy in which cigarettes from low-tax states or countries are smuggled across borders and sold for big profits where prices are higher. By 2014, nearly half of all smokes in New York City came from low-tax states, such as Virginia. It’s a scheme profitable enough to attract al-Qaida terrorists and the Mafia. The tobacco industry overproduces their merchandise for dodgy distributors to smuggle across state lines and national borders. But tax-dodging is a gray market, unlike the wholly illicit ones of cocaine and methamphetamine. However, what if tobacco were completely illegal?

Bhutan banned tobacco in 2010, only for a smuggling route to open up from India. As a result, the tiny Himalayan kingdom maintained the highest smoking rate in South Asia. Prohibition was lifted last year, when it became apparent that smugglers were a main source of COVID-19. South Africa forbade tobacco for five months in 2020 to prevent the respiratory problems associated with the pandemic, but 93% of smokers kept buying contraband cigarettes smuggled from Zimbabwe. Although South Africa fenced off the border to prevent virus carriers sneaking through, smugglers kept getting in. Gayle Amul notes that black markets exist even in countries where tobacco is legal, and blames the tobacco industry for “inflating the magnitude of illicit tobacco trade in countries where more stringent control measures are being proposed.”

So what would it take to truly stamp out smoking? Turkmenistan’s authoritarian regime first forbade smoking from all public places and then later withdrew all tobacco from sale, effectively outlawing smoking (visitors from abroad can still bring a couple of packs to consume in private). Contraband cigarettes are burned atop pyres alongside narcotics, and public smokers risk arrest. Turkmenistan now has one of the lowest smoking rates in the world — but it’s a severely repressive regime whose political critics are routinely tortured, which is also bad for your health.

Prohibition also risks creating markets that aren’t subject to the same rules and regulations as legit products. Parts of the world where alcohol is banned suffer regular moonshine poisonings. Similarly, fentanyl contamination in the U.S. has killed many drug users who thought they were taking heroin. Bootleggers already produce counterfeit cigarettes using cheap, low-quality materials with high levels of nicotine and toxic contaminants, such as lead. Those who continue lighting up may be in an even more perilous position than before. “That’s always possible, and already happens to some extent with counterfeit cigarettes,” Steve Rolles, a policy analyst at the British drug reform organization, Transform, told OZY. “But I suspect it would be more of a gray market of smuggled goods — less problematic than illegal drugs more generally.” Rolles thinks the market will wither away over the next couple of generations, especially in the developed world. But his ideal route to getting there isn’t through bans.

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“The moral calculus on this is complicated by vaping and other non-smoked nicotine products,” Rolles said. By prohibiting access only to one particularly harmful form of nicotine — smokable tobacco — authorities would allow the culture to change gradually. This approach is based on the principle of harm reduction: If someone doesn’t want to stop taking drugs, the best you can do is make it as safe for them as possible. Most experts agree vaping is substantially less harmful than cigarettes. Studies show e-cigarettes are more effective at helping smokers quit than nicotine replacement medication. There’s not much evidence for vaping as a “gateway drug” to cigarettes either. In one study, less than 1% of vapers went on to become smokers. Also considered healthier than cigarettes is snus, a small packet of tobacco which you hold in your mouth, absorbing the nicotine through your gums. Snus is legal in Sweden, which has Europe’s lowest smoking rate.

And yet many world leaders and the WHO seem dead set against these options. In Europe, snus can be purchased lawfully only in Norway and Sweden, leaving a flourishing smuggling business across Finland’s 310 mile-long western border, where authorities estimate they intercept only 10% of the shipments. If Malaysia’s proposal goes through, it will phase out vapes along with cigarettes. Vapes have already been taken out of circulation in Mexico, and banned outright in the Philippines, where former President Rodrigo Duterte said smokers “should be exterminated from the face of the earth.”

Rolles said he finds the targeting of vaping, snus and other safer options “bewildering and inexplicable,” given that “the evidence supporting vaping as a form of harm reduction seems so utterly overwhelming.” Millions, he said, could die as a result of such bans. Rolles said that he suspects the “deep-rooted” hostility toward smoking and Big Tobacco among sections of policy makers is the reason for this categorical opposition. He understands that sentiment toward the tobacco industry but argues it’s counterproductive from a public health perspective. “Smoking will always be around, even if the market continues to contract,” he said. “Sensible regulation is almost always better than prohibition.”

What are your thoughts on the efficacy of the war on tobacco?

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