Plain packaging of ciggy packs is part of the tobaco police agenda. I have problems accepting the plain package approach. This column is about an increase of over 40% in tax rates in Hong Kong. The tobacl police are alive and well and very powerful in HK.
I do not smoke and my father, 2 of his brothers and one sister died as a consequence of smoking. However where is free will and where is compassion for the poor?
Tobacco tax too much, too fast for poor The poorest are being targeted by the proposed duty increase, which will increase their suffering JAKE'S VIEW Jake van der Kamp Jun 14, 2011 Email to friend Print a copy Bookmark and Share
Hong Kong risks becoming an international laughing stock if lawmakers vote down the government's proposed tobacco tax increase this week, the Council on Smoking and Health warned yesterday.
SCMP, June 13
I expect my laptop to start glowing red this morning with e-mail screams of protest from the anti-tobacco lobby - how dare you, how dare you take a stand in favour of smoking?
Well, I am not taking a stand in favour of smoking. But I am taking a stand against big increases in the tobacco tax. If you want to target a tax at the poor, you cannot do better than take aim at tobacco. If you want to insult the poor at the same time you cannot do better than abolish the tax targeted at the rich - wine duties. Our financial secretary has done both.
Let me make my declaration first. I was a cigarette smoker for 35 years and finally quit four and a half years ago, going cold turkey and enduring the usual three weeks of misery and months of feeling deprived. I have got over it, although I still like to stand downwind from a cigarette every now and then.
But I think I also know what life is like for a construction labourer squatting at the side of a building site for a smoke break with his mates. I've held down a few real working jobs in my time and the smoke break was one of the highlights of the day. People live in the here and now when they do heavy labour. They don't think about long term consequences; the long term is often too bleak anyway.
You may say that the pleasures of a smoke break nonetheless do not outweigh the health risks, and I accept this. Punishing people who are already in straightened circumstances, however, is a nasty way of forcing virtue on them.
I'm proud of having quit, but not everyone can do it. I sympathise with people whose living costs are squeezed because they have an addictive habit they find it difficult to forego.
The latest budget proposed a 41.5 per cent increase in tobacco duties, which follows a 50 per cent hike two years ago. Together it amounts to a more than doubling of the tax in two years. A number of legislators believe it has happened much too fast, and I think they are right.
I shall be told of course, lectured in fact, that international agencies have conducted studies proving that higher tobacco taxes are very effective in making people quit.
If so, and if our aim is to make all Hong Kong smokers quit immediately, why not impose a tax of a million dollars on every pack of smokes? The fact that this was not proposed in the budget indicates very clearly that the financial secretary also accepts that there is such a thing as too much too quickly. He and the legislators really differ only in degree.
The anti-tobacco lobby does not appear to accept this, however. Its members would outlaw tobacco outright if they had the chance. They therefore have little to contribute to a debate that is premised on gradual disincentives.
But then we have the Council on Smoking and Health warning us that we will be an "international laughing stock" if the 41.5 per cent increase is rolled back because, says chairwoman Lisa Lau Man-man, we would be telling smokers "it is OK for them to continue the lethal habit."
We would be telling them no such thing. Reducing the increase in tobacco taxes from the level proposed in the budget does not say the government approves of tobacco. It says only that government recognises that there is such a thing as too much hardship imposed too quickly.
If we wish to adopt a strict no mercy approach towards tobacco, however, why not do the same with alcohol, which also causes health and social problems, or with problem gambling, which afflicts the families of those who suffer from it worse than smoking does?
Why not prohibit junk food to combat obesity, a much faster growing health risk these days than smoking-related ailments? Why not preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics by stopping their widespread misuse in animal feed? Why is the anti-tobacco lobby the most uncompromisingly strident of all health lobbies?
Even if it can demonstrate that tobacco is the worst of all health related evils, the lobby should make some concession to the general income scale of tobacco addicts, who are almost exclusively the poor. While squeezing the incomes of the poor to make them do what you want may be very effective in manipulating social behaviour, I think it an objectionable approach.
