Thursday 11 September 2014

Yet more failure in Australia

More awkward news for plain pack campaigners, this time from Cancer Council Queensland:

"New Queensland Health data has found a sharp increase in the prevalence of smoking among Queenslanders aged between 25 and 34 years old over the past two years.

"This trend defies the declines we have seen in other age groups, with 28 per cent of men in the 25-34 age bracket now smoking every day, compared with 19.8 per cent in 2012.

"Among women in the 25-34 age bracket, the rate of smoking has increased from 12.8 per cent to 16.7 per cent.

Alas, the figures for the other age groups are not given, but so much for plain packs making cigarettes taste worse and making smokers rush to the Quitline.

The reason for the Cancer Council talking about the huge surge in smoking prevalence in this key demographic (smoking rates are highest in the 25-34 year age group) is that it wants to ban smoking outside (no need to make up stuff about secondhand smoke at this stage in the game). In this, it echoes the government of South Australia which started a campaign for the same policy back in May by making this crucial admission:

Health Minister Jack Snelling said the new measures would help to tackle an increase in the State’s smoking rates which have increased from 16.7 per cent to 19.4 percent over the past 12 months.

Combine these two states with New South Wales, where the official survey found a rise in smoking prevalence of 14.7% to 16.4% (not statistically significant, but certainly not indicative of a decline), and plain packaging looks like a damp squib once again.

Meanwhile...

Black market in tobacco booming in the streets of Sydney, with cheap Asian imports flooding the streets

  • Cigarette smuggling on the rise, one in eight cigarettes smuggled 
  • Areas with large migrant populations are prime markets for the trade 
  •  Some smuggled cigarettes contain ‘mould, faeces and even asbestos’ 
  • 500,000 cigarettes and $1m in cash seized in recent raids

    It is emerging as one of the most lucrative illegal trades on the streets of Sydney’s southwest, but it’s not drug dealing or car boosting — it’s smuggling cigarettes. Last month, in seven raids across Fairfield and Bankstown, police seized more than 500,000 smuggled cigarettes and $1 million cash.


The words 'chickens', 'home' and 'roost' spring to mind.

4 comments:

JohnB said...

Here’s a comment appearing in an Australian (South Australia) newspaper in1912:

A paragraph in The Register of September 14, 1912, announced that the City
Council is daring to deal with the smoke nuisance. If the council can remove from our streets the smoke which is continually puffed in our faces, and so give us a chance to breathe the purest air obtainable, some of us will be exceedingly grateful, and the names of the men responsible for the change will be passed onto future generations as those of men who had courage to face an evil and deal with it and not merely to talk and write on health matters. At present it is dangerous to a person's health to walk through the streets of Adelaide.


http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/58599326?searchTerm=smoking&searchLimits=

The same old derangement, over and over again.

Unknown said...

Poor ol' Chappie.

nisakiman said...

Yes, I bet Prof Chapman is going to be spinning for all he's worth for the next couple of years, until people forget what the alleged point of PP was in the first place.

It was pretty much a given that PP wasn't going to achieve anything, but then I don't suppose it was intended to. I think the whole exercise is simply to try to remove another aspect of the pleasure of smoking, because they just don't like smokers enjoying smoking. So as well as taxing tobacco punitively and mandating foul tasting fire retardant chemical additives, they are also removing any aesthetics associated with smoking.

Their hatred of smokers is quite implacable. I'm sure a lot of the zealots would much rather just load all the smokers onto cattle trucks and deliver them to camps with "Arbeit Macht Frei" written above the gates.

Ben said...

"Some smuggled cigarettes contain ‘mould, faeces and even asbestos’"
Another scare tactic. Have they forgotten to mention motor oil, mortar, shredded plastic bags, and dead mice?