Re: Eloise Johnstone’s editorial, “Governments are right to ban smoking” (Bendigo Advertiser, August 27,2012).
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Federal Attorney General Nicola Roxon’s reform on plain packaging of cigarettes is completely welcome and worthy or worldwide acclaim.
The proposed Tasmanian legislation to ban the sale of tobacco to those born after 2000 merely takes Tasmania back to a kind of 1920s American prohibition era, and, despite Ms Johnstone’s comparison, is the opposite of the Tasmanian state government’s “bold” position on same-sex marriage.
During the American prohibition on alcohol, drinking was not outlawed, only the retail sale of alcohol.
In the same way, smoking will not be illegal in Tasmania, only the sale of tobacco to those born after 2000. It is ridiculous to claim smoking will therefore “be phased out in six years’ time” as Ms Johnstone asserts.
What is more likely is that Tasmania will continue to deal with the myriad health concerns of nicotine addiction, plus a fledgling, dangerously unregulated tobacco black-market.
As the 1920s alcohol prohibition and the current scourge of the criminal economy, violence, death, disease and social misery created by our global policies upon “illicit” drugs proves, prohibition inadvertently results in the flourishing of networks of powerfully ruthless criminal syndicates, and a subsequently furtive and criminalised sub-culture of addicts.
No other advanced country in the world bans tobacco, and for good reason.
Any modern, progressive and democratically elected government will rightly impose “government intervention” by maintaining strict regulation, continued education and comprehensive health care as a means of avoiding the creation of new and lucrative markets for criminals.
Michelle Goldsmith,
Eaglehawk