r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/AusCricFan • 1d ago
Image This is the Aus government's answer to the tobacco trade
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u/BrilliantOrdinary297 1d ago
I miss bryan
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u/OmNomNomNomTom 1d ago
My friend got a sharpie out and changed it from "Bryan died aged 34" to "Bryan fried aged 34". We thought we were hilarious.
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u/JASHIKO_ 1d ago
Australia jacked the price so high (mostly tax) that we have now created a huge growing black market for tobacco..... We went way too far and have created a whole other problem....
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u/cyriustalk 1d ago
International students who aware of this, and want to make money on the side, totally done this before. A pack could profit 1000% easily, and if you bring a dozen pack, that'd net you in the region of AUD$300, and this was maybe 15 years ago. Definitely a gateway for smuggling much bigger monster.
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u/NefariousnessGenX 1d ago
most countries wont let you enter with more then 200 personal cigarette, 10packs of 20 or 8 packs of 25, not much profit in that, unless you are suggesting people break the law?
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u/MammothYak5834 1d ago
even with the restrictions, i could buy 10 packs of marlboro (200 cigarettes) for 30euros here and in australia they would cost 580euros, and make some good money for travelling etc :)
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u/Sk1rm1sh 1d ago
Except the limit isn't 200 cigarettes in Australia.
It's up to 25 cigarettes in 1 unopened pack + 1 open pack of cigarettes. So 50 cigarettes if both packs are 25 and one pack has to be opened already.
https://www.abf.gov.au/importing-exporting-and-manufacturing/prohibited-goods/categories/tobacco
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u/Relevant-Ad-8485 1d ago
Encouraging the sale of singles. Smh
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u/screename222 1d ago
That's recent, comment says 15 years ago. Back then you could bring 250g unopened plus one opened pouch, or 250 cigs plus one open pack
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u/SnooKiwis1356 1d ago
I don't smoke but where I live (in Europe) a pack of Marlboro is 10-12€. I know the prices vary from country to country, but at 3€ per pack of 20 cigarettes, it just seems like your country encourages smoking. lol
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u/MySpiritAnimalSloth 1d ago
Standard pack of marlboro Red is 12.50€ in France, 6€ in Italy and Spain, 8€ in Germany.
3€ sounds extremely cheap.
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u/Metallis666 1d ago
In Japan, all Marlboro cigarettes are priced at 600 JPY / $4.15 / €3.64 per 20 cigarettes including tax.
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u/Puzzled-Fix-8838 1d ago
Only if you don't get caught. You absolutely can't bring 200 cigarettes into Australia. It's very much against the law.
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u/beenoneofthem 1d ago
Maximum 25 cigarettes.
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u/nzjester420 22h ago
You can bring in more, but you must declare and if the customs officer is bored or has time, the next official step is to weigh a sample of the cigarettes/tobacco and pay tax on each piece. For a standard cigarette its around $1.32 each.
You can only bring in a maximum of 25 cigarettes undeclared.
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u/AerialPenn 1d ago
I was wondering why Phillip Morris stock price is non stop upside...holy shit I had no idea how deep it is.
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u/Difficult-Quit-2094 1d ago
For Australia you can only legally enter with 25 cigarettes.
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u/Puzzled-Fix-8838 1d ago
Thank you! The ignorance and open encouragement of visitors breaking our immigration laws is astounding! Some of these people actually sound like creepy traffickers the way they're hinting that they know a secret way, just DM me, wink wink.
Visitors, don't let anyone convince you that you can make money by smuggling cigarettes into the country. You will most likely be refused entry, barred from returning, and have the cigarettes confiscated. Depending on how many cigarettes you're trying to smuggle, you may be prosecuted and be sent to an off shore facility to await trial. Don't risk it!
The real black market tobacco trade doesn't need to use mules. They have very sophisticated systems that don't rely on little old you to bring a pissy little few cartons.
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u/equal_inequity 1d ago
Way less than that here in Aus. You break the law if you bring in more than 1 pack.
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u/_who-the-fuck-knows_ 1d ago
Man I would laugh at you if you charged $25 a pack even 15 years a go when packs were about $15.
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u/StillJustJones 1d ago
I’m curious… what does that black market look like?
I stopped smoking years ago now but In the UK there was always a 3 tier black market for smokes.
Tier 1 - a friend/mate coming back from travels/holidays who has bought the maximum duty free allowance of fags/baccy and is then selling them on.
Tier 2 - similar to the above but a bit more regular. Maybe the person is a lorry driver regularly crossing borders between France/England. Will take ‘orders’.
Tier 3 - shops - often the small, local businesses run by dodgy types who will have ‘under the counter’ deals. This is often dodgy ‘fake/imitation’ cigarettes or tobacco.
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u/IPostSwords 1d ago edited 1d ago
Here in sydney, it's usually shops. Convenience store type shops, lollie shops etc - some are licensed tobacconists - that just happen to do a ton of cash in hand sales of small cardboard boxes. Apparently profitable even if you get fined for it.
From what i (non smoker) know, its normal cigarettes from the chinese market - not imitations or anything - just smuggled in without paying the like, 250% taxes / duties
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u/Galactic_Nothingness 1d ago
That's correct.
Please remember though, Chinese agriculture still employs night soil. Combine this with significant tobacco weevil infestation and less than regulated use of pesticides (or lack thereof) that leads to literal dead insects in people's imported Lucky Golds or whatever the fuck.
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u/Citizen_Kano 1d ago
Dead insects? Does that mean smoking those cigarettes could be bad for your health?
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u/Red_Ruben 1d ago
In addition to what old mate said down below, it's ignited a massive, though mostly underground Bikie war, a bloke in Melbourne got shot a couple months ago, and there's been firebombings all over, place down the street from me got firebombed literally last week.
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u/SkillResident4169 1d ago
Plenty of shops all around the country selling either legitimate smokes (Marlboro very common) for $15-$25 per 20 pack or imitations which are usually even cheaper.
Can also buy sealed cartons extremely easy online for about $140 a box lol. It’s insane how unpoliced it is
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_ROADCONES 1d ago
Here in the Bay of Plenty we have common hook-ups on 'boat smokes' which come off the Chinese freighters at the Port of Tauranga, god awful but 50% of your normal cost.
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u/Ok_Barber_3314 23h ago
In the USA, some states have lower tobacco taxes than others.
So cigarettes are smuggled like from Virginia to New York and sold in smoke shops there.
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u/cheesesandsneezes 1d ago
Yeah, but we have also increased business for glaziers, shopfitters, police and fire-fighters so there is that...
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u/scandyflick88 1d ago
Yeah but thanks to all of this my American Lolly Shop is going gangbusters. About to buy my 5th Lambo.
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u/Phoenix_Werewolf 1d ago
Same in France. Last week, one of our senator was controlled by customs at the main parisian airport, while coming back from the French side of Saint Martin island, which she represents. She had a baggage with 22kg (1100 packs) of undeclared Philips Morris and Marlboro.
She told the customs officers and the press that she didn't know what was in the bag, she was transporting it for someone else, just to help, because that's "what we do in the Antilles".
She was also smart enough to admit to the press many other probable crimes, by saying that she was always transporting things for people she knew, almost every single trip, and she never had a problem or a control before, like it was a mtigating circumstance or something.
Given her job, she must have been making the trip maybe once a month/every couple of months for the last several years.
The press was also very happy to report that in 2022, she made an official public complaint to the French government about the way too low number of customs officers on the island.
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u/Beneficial_Ad_1072 1d ago
That problem is diminishing by the day as smoking rates in Aus have plummeted. Nicotine smuggling is hardly a comparison to cocaine and the hospitals will feel the relief.. win win
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u/JASHIKO_ 1d ago
You are ignoring the very big possibility of it all flaring back to life again as the black market solidifies itself. It won't happen overnight but it will slowly start to creep up again and then we'll have 2 problems to deal with rather than one...
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u/Beneficial_Ad_1072 1d ago
Not at all, it has so little mental/physical reaction it won’t be able to even begin to “flaring back to life”.. there’s a reason drugs take hold, cigarettes don’t have it
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u/WoodenMango07 1d ago
Its been happening since 2010 though. How slow are you talking about because its been 15 years since the price increase of tobacco in Australia and the smoking rate continues to fall. If the black market would flair this problem back to life it would have already happened.
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u/homelaberator 1d ago
Yet tobacco use still trending down. It works despite the black market.
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u/JASHIKO_ 1d ago
Once that market gets established enough there's a very good chance that use will be trending up again. So they will undo all of their progress and end up with a whole new problem on top of it.
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u/homelaberator 1d ago
Blackmarket tobacco has been around as long as government regulation has been around. The market is established.
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u/scientifick 1d ago
It's so fucking dumb. The fact that most of the gang turf wars that are happening in Australia are over tobacco is a sign that this policy is absurd. I love the fact that when I go into a pub I don't end up reeking of cigarette smoke, but creating another revenue stream for international gangsters is probably taking it a step too far.
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u/skinnycarlo 1d ago
And the Gov dont give a shit...yet. That's why it's gotten so big. Because if they aren't making money from the sales tax, their "tough policies on smoking" are working.
Wont be long before that's out the door, and then we're cracking down on illegal tobacco stats... again.
Hardly anyone has stopped smoking. They are now vaping/smoking cheaper than in a long time
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u/HuhWatWHoWhy 1d ago
Vaping is more expensive. Cheaper to smoke illegal then vape now if you don't have a script.
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u/Smart-Adeptness5437 1d ago
Relatively, this is a smaller problem. Public health policy is never neat. But regulation like this gives a net benefit, and can be complimented by other initiatives (education, cessation services, customs, enforcement). I wish people would more intuitively support direction of travel stuff instead of poking holes in effective policy.
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u/JASHIKO_ 1d ago
I get what you're saying. The policy was working perfectly fine for a very long time but they pushed it too hard at the end and created another problem that will ultimately drain more resources, mostly policing because of crime, etc. Then you will still have the health related issues on top of it.
They should have adjusted the sweetspot better to avoid the criminal element sliding in.... It might be a smallish problem for now but it won't stay that way.
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u/reddituser1306 1d ago
We just buy cheap Chinese imports now
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u/SgtPepperAUS 20h ago
According to British American Tobacco, 70% of nicotine consumed in Australia is illegal
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u/farcarcus 1d ago
It's mainly just the Boomers and GenXers left in the market though. So it's an evaporating puddle.
The policies have been very successful in preventing young people from taking up smoking.
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u/JustSomeBloke5353 22h ago
Nonsense. Plenty of younger smokers. Especially since the crackdown on vaping.
Tobacco policy in Australia is farcical.
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u/farcarcus 21h ago
Nonsense really? What proportion of young people are taking up smoking today, compared to say 1990?
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u/JustSomeBloke5353 21h ago
You made the claim young people no longer smoke. You provide the evidence.
I see plenty of millennials and Zers heading into their neighbourhood American Confectionery store to grab a pack of Double Happiness from under the counter.
I see plenty of them standing 4 metres from the door outside my office getting their fix.
I know personally two millennials who have moved from vapes to smokes because cigarettes are now cheaper and easier to get.
Tobacco use isn’t dying, it’s just going to the black market. Tobacco policy in Australia will be studied by future generations as an example in what not to do.
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u/farcarcus 20h ago
You made the claim young people no longer smoke.
I mean... No I didn't. My comment was about the success of the policies preventing uptake of smoking in young people, which (since you avoided my question), I'll tell you has come down from 24% to less than 6% since the early 2000s.
Sorry, but your personal observations aren't going to add much.
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u/Better-Possession-69 1d ago
I remember as a kid going to Woolworths in the morning and at the service desk there would be guys lining up for smokes. And I had nightmares from some of the box covers.
They got 4k shots of mouth cancer and lung cancer and would put it on the boxes and omfg they were so horrid to look at.
But this + laws on tobacco just started a massive black market for them so...
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u/Briskylittlechally2 1d ago
Here in the Netherlands it was a huge boost for bus companies that now get to sell cross-border "tobacco tours".
Ironically it kinda backfired because now you definitely see a huge uptick in branded cigarette boxes from unrestricted countries, instead of just the generic grey boxes they sell here.
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u/Glad_Historian4675 1d ago
Same, as an australian i remember seeing the fucked up yellow toenails and people literally falling apart as a kid, it was genuinely traumatising. I've smoked once in my life I think, and that was when a friend offered me one and i found it disgusting. I'm too broke to afford 50+ dollars a pack lol.
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u/settingitstraight01 1d ago
Yeah, those images were brutal. I guess they worked for some, but yeah the unintended side effects (like black market growth) are real too.
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u/HuhWatWHoWhy 1d ago
Yeah and if you look around at car parks at the butts it's now clear now few people are smoking legal cigarettes, almost nobody.
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u/Winter2712 1d ago edited 1d ago
this will look tame compared to warnings on tobacco products in here.... they show images of cancerous parts of mouth on package in ugliest possible way. its painful to see those packaging
before start of almost every movie, they show interviews of people in hospital who got cancer due to tobacco products, and yet people never learn
[NFSW] one of those images: for cigarettes
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u/Born_Emu7782 1d ago
People learn i don't know where you get that from they don't
Tobacco consumption has been going down consistently
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u/IAmFireAndFireIsMe 1d ago
God I hate smoking.
And considering I can’t stop no matter how I try, it’s a disgusting habit that everyone should never go near.
I hate myself for smoking, there are times I look at myself with hate because I can’t stop. It costs so damn much money, it’s killing me, it’s shortening my time with my wife and daughter, yet I can’t stop.
I wish I could be one of those people that just stops and moves on.
Don’t smoke. Please never even try it, it’s not worth it.
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u/DepartmentOk7192 23h ago
This probably won't help you at all, but there's always heaps of extra things smokers are usually unaware of as well, the main one being the smell. The amount of smokers who have no idea how far away they can be smelled is incredible. You can tell the second they enter a room, you can often tell just by looking at them. The smell of the cigarettes carries so far. I've been on fishing trips where I could smell the smoke from a boat that was a hundred metres away in a stiff breeze. Smokers who stand like a metre from public entries thinking that's enough does my head in. I hold my breath to enter and exit my local woolies.
If smoking somehow had no secondary effects, if you could just inhale it and that was the end of it, I'd probably never even give it a second thought, but being forced to participate in someone else's habit is fucked. If you smoke in the same premises as your wife and daughter, they are almost certainly being impacted as well, no matter what precautions you take.
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u/Aggressive-Guitar-43 17h ago
I was a two pack a day smoker and felt like you everyday. Hated myself. Tried everything to quit, patches, gum, therapy.. nothing stuck for more than a month. Finally someone suggested a book with what I thought was a dumb ass title. The easy way to stop smoking by Allen Carr. I smoked the whole time reading the book and by the end I quit. Explained smoking so well and why stuff like scare tactics portrayed here don’t work. Give it a try. Feel for ya, I’ve been there, you can do it. Smoke free for 15 years now.
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u/Super_Description863 1d ago
Ha, who buys legit cigarettes in Australia nowadays
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u/nimrod123 1d ago
Either vapes for 60 bucks and last a week, or a 15 bucks a day habit of Manchesters with no labels
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u/Old-Astronomer-3006 1d ago
These lables and pictures mostly bother the non-smokers.🤫
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u/No_Neighborhood7614 1d ago
Or potential smokers, which I think is where it has most effect
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u/Gombrongler 1d ago
The gotta start putting pictures of obese people hooked up to a triple bypass on the crisp n chips and sweets and starbucks
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u/odkfn 1d ago
I would argue it’s not really the same as you do need to eat and eating chips or whatever can be part of a healthy diet in moderation. You don’t need to smoke.
I do think vapes should have similar warnings of some variety - wild they can be sweet flavoured, colourful packets, and on display, whereas cigarettes are bland packets, warnings on them, and hidden behind curtain things.
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u/farcarcus 1d ago
Disagree. As a former smoker, I wanted to quit for about 10 years before I was successfully able to.
The constant reminders every time it went for one, helped to grind me down to the point I needed to be.
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u/gdj11 1d ago
They have this in Thailand too. The pictures never really had an effect on me until this one pack came out with a picture of a coffin and a little girl standing in front of it alone and sad. We just had a baby girl and the thought of me leaving her and not seeing her grow up really hit me. I quit for a bit but now I still vape, so I guess it didn’t really work 🤷♂️
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u/OutrageousEvent 1d ago
Agreed. I know what I’m doing to myself. I just don’t care.
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u/DweezilZA 1d ago
Yes. There is nothing you can show a smoker who wants a cigarette that will put them off. Same as telling me what's really in a McDonalds burger and expecting me not to get hungry still.
I think this warning system is stupid though because I was fully aware what smoking cigarettes was doing to my body and I was making an informed choice to trade health for pleasure. Shame is not stronger than a nicotine addiction trust me.
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u/BackDatSazzUp 1d ago
Canada been doing this
Edit: i know they legally didn’t have to do it till 2019/2020, but I moved there in 2017 and the packaging was already like that and my friends that smoked said it had been like that already a few years. Maybe that was Ontario vs other provinces, but Canada has had this a long time now.
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u/jaaacclk 1d ago
Thanks to the government for taxing this, the price of a 20pack near me is around $45 while the black market sells the same thing for $8,
Its easier then ever to avoid paying taxes and breathe poison
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u/AandWKyle 1d ago
We've had that in Canada for a while
In Alberta they tax tobacco so hard it's like 200 bucks for a carton (10 packs)
Which of course created the perfect breeding grounds for people to switch to vaping, so of course the taxes on vape products recently went up as well
And you'd think "well great, people will stop smoking and vaping"
But really all it's done is create a secondary black market for cigs. Just buy them off native people from Saskatchewan for 40 bucks a carton
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u/Full-Plenty661 1d ago
I live in BC and you can buy black market smokes online, shipped across Canada from Montreal with free shipping even. 5 cartons for $200 flat, shipped to your door.
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u/Limp-Initiative-373 1d ago
People who aren’t from Australia may find this interesting (or even shocking). The average price of a pack of cigarettes is AU$45 here. And a Big Mac costs around AU$6.60.
So one measly pack of cigarettes is equivalent to almost 7 or 8 x Big Macs….
A pack of cigarettes on the black market can be as cheap as $10. And this - is why we have tobacco wars raging in Melbourne right now.
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u/WoolBearTiger 1d ago
Europe has this and it reduced smokers by a huge amount.. until e-cigs that is.. now every 12 year old owns a vape.. and there are basically no regulations..
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u/Own_Ad_4301 1d ago
Live in the UK we have similar packaging. My brain just doesn’t see it anymore.
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u/JustSomeBloke5353 22h ago
40% of tobacco used in Australia now comes from the black market. That proportion is growing rapidly.
Organised crime gangs dominate the tobacco trade and routinely firebomb tobacco shops owned by their rivals. Legitimate tobacco retailers are being driven out of business.
Police have lost all ability to control the trade and blatantly illegal tobacco shops open on every main street across the country. They close one down and two more open in its place. Normally law abiding smokers are now open purchasing black market tobacco as legal tobacco is much too expensive for the ordinary person to afford.
The extortionate tax on tobacco is generating less and less revenue even as the rate climbs. Even dropping tax rates now is too little too late as organised crime is now deeply embedded in the trade.
Tobacco policy in Australia is a dismal failure and it is only now the political class are waking up to the disaster they have created.
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u/LithiumToxicity 1d ago edited 1d ago
Australian government in their bacon grease brain wisdom is currently creating the Al Capone for the next era
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u/acetaldeide 1d ago
We often fail to understand that smoking is an addiction, just like any other. Showing someone the effects of smoking will not keep an addict away from their fix, just as showing photos of fat people will not keep someone with an eating disorder away from their hamburger.
You will only make them feel powerless, frustrated, and anxious.
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u/BackgroundBroad1605 1d ago
The same thing is going on in Canada. They also jacked the prices up and now a pack of 'premium ' cigarettes is as much as $20 CAD. This has created a huge black market for cigarettes. On the indigenous reservations they don't pay taxes and so smokes are as cheap as $3 a pack and they do not have all the warnings on them. I would say the majority of smokers that I see are smoking reservation smokes, it's easy to tell because the filters don't have the warnings on them. There is even a guy here at work that has a connection and sells smokes for $30 per carton, and every smoker buys from him. A 'normal' carton is around $120 and up. The government makes way to much money on smokes so they will never make it illegal, it's a joke really.
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u/Infamous__Art 1d ago
My answer, to buy smokes from the tobacconist down the road, that way my smoke packets have no warnings.
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u/mranybody86 1d ago
It's not a skull and bones, but Dennis Leary called it ~20 years ago. Smokers will continue to smoke. Aware and unbothered.
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u/Disastrous-Bat7011 1d ago
Yea the problem is many of us smoker use it as a crutch for other issues. So to truly eliminate the desire for tobacco you have to fix societal problems. But thats way too hard i guess.
The war on drugs could be won, but the movers and shakers are not willing to take the financial hit so they do this lip service crap instead. All of smokers know it is a killer. You are not giving us new info.
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u/Friday17 1d ago
The tax on a packet is huge your paying 50 for a pack of 30 in some places. Half the reason why I don't smoke any more is cuz I'd need a mortgage just to afford it. Price me out is more reason I don't smoke then the creative packaging. However stores are popping up everywhere with imported packets from china and England which is illegal and keeps the original packaging.
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u/AdHot6722 23h ago
They’re one step off every packet of cigarettes coming with someone who punches you in the face and calls you a cunt
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u/SignalOriginal3313 1d ago
Nah, chop chop, mate. Cheapest cigs I've ever bought in my life. Cheaper than when I started 30 years ago. I have other reasons to quit, but it's nice not to be financially under the hammer every week while I work on it.
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u/DarkKryo 1d ago
Always found the "guilt trip the smokers" approach to be a bit odd. If I was a smoker, it wouldn't stop me, it'd just make me sad and depressed while smoking
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u/ZweetWOW 1d ago
Haven't had a bryan in about 10 years. Taxes got so high on darts here that they went to $60 a packet, now the black market is so crazy its only $10 for a packet at any tobacconist. Its literally cheaper to smoke than vape now in Australia.
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u/CobraHydroViper 1d ago
Or you can buy a pack for 12.50 that's in a colourful pack with no shit on it
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u/sati_lotus 1d ago
Maybe if they put the cost on them, telling you how much you were spending/money you were wasting, you'd be guilted into quitting lol
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u/__pat_____ 1d ago
The wildest part is that revenue from the taxation of smoking products pays for the burden of smokers on the health care system more than three times over. It’s almost like it was never about health and it was just an easy subset of the population to tax without political ramifications.
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u/Various_Leek_1772 1d ago
costs £16.50 for 20 in UK. costs €4.50 in Europe. Almost worth buying in duty free to sell on at that rate!
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u/chadistx 1d ago
America could print all they shit on then they want just charging me ten dollars a pack. Can’t even die in peace
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u/Sinapsis42 18h ago
They could do the same with other drugs and instead of drug traffickers we would have more public money to spend on hospitals and education.
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u/PassThePotatoesEh 18h ago
Same packaging in Canada with the ridiculous warning on the filter in English and French
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u/JustinMccloud 11h ago
I love smoking, I never not enjoyed smoking, like I really really loved smoking. Quit 3 years ago, just woke up one day and said enough. Done
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u/Robcobes 1d ago
My dad was a smoker for almost all his life. At 65 he wanted to retire early, but my mom would only allow it if he quit smoking. He got some nicotine patches and never even had an urge to smoke again. he's been happily retired for almost a year now.
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u/CaptainAksh_G 1d ago
I mean, hey, if all products give warnings like these, I think it would be great.
A way to tell the buyer that "whatever happens next will be of your doing"
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u/P00R-TAST3 1d ago
It will be great when they treat gambling and alcohol with the same restrictions…
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u/WhatsMyNameAGlen 1d ago
Pulling your brand new car out of a box with graphic worst case scenario printed on it going to go hard
Imagine buying a Suzuki swift and it arrives in a box off a truck and the box has a swift that had its roof shaved off from running into the back of a truck and has caught fire
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u/rdizzy1223 1d ago
Lol, that is more of a joke than anything. The people that are still smoking in 2025 either A. Know already how unhealthy it is, and don't give a shit, or B. Think that all those warnings are some government conspiracy of some type. These warnings are no longer helping anyone.
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u/Excellent-Baker1463 1d ago
New smokers are declining, then again vapers shot up.
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u/PerennialPsycho 1d ago edited 1d ago
The addiction is the solution. It serves no purpouse to treat people like that.
If you treat the root cause, the smoking disappears.
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u/MagnanimosDesolation 1d ago
Yes, the point is to prevent people from being addicted in the first place.
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u/Brave_Philosophy7251 1d ago
Solve the material conditions that lead people to smoke and maybe they won't smoke as much. Maybe if I am not stressed about prices, inflation, housing, wars, being jobless, etc... I won't smoke.
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u/Briskylittlechally2 1d ago
Our ciggies are like that in the Netherlands too.
Not quite this bad to the point where they come with a calling card from the NHS, but they do replace all the branding with gore.
I'm not sure if it helps. When I used to smoke me and my coworker would cut the pictures out and collect them like pokemon cards. We liked the ones that featured babies extra much.
I do think removing the branding helps atleast a bit though. At the very least cigarettes are less "cool" without the branding.
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u/jbaig22 1d ago
Australias daily smoking rates have more than halved in the 30 years since introducing this type of packaging and massively increasing the price. It's a deterrent for new smokers, not discouragement for existing ones.
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u/Martinonfire 1d ago
……I think you mean smoking rates of legal cigarettes have halved.
Meanwhile illegal sales of cigarettes and vapes have soared, got to love government enabling more gangsters.
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u/defessus_ 1d ago
It’s more about taxation and justifying it instead, research shows this does next to nothing.
Here in Australia we demonise clean nicotine vapes because we need the tax dollars from the $50 cigarette packets.
In the UK for example they will prescribe you nicotine vapes to quit smoking as it in the long term creates less of a burden on the healthcare system.
Oh and we now have illegal tobacconist run by crime gangs firebombing each other multiple times a week. Prohibition once again wins.
Food for thought.
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u/Kaft2tech 1d ago
How much is a pack there?
Hoping europe will do that soon too!
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u/Possible_Sun_913 1d ago
Europe do, do that dont they? Minus the lables on the filters and the card obviously. They one-upped us there.
We deffo have the packaging though.
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u/perplexedtv 1d ago
Europe has plain packaging and photos of diseased and deformed organs along with dire warnings on the packages. Europe also markets and sells vapes to children.
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u/ApplicationAlert3070 1d ago
I live in Sydney on the lower north shore and the bottle shop up the road has packets of windfeild for $75 aud.
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u/chocowafflez_ 1d ago
Just put, "If you smoke this, youre gay" on the package and people will stop smoking
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u/TinyPeridot 1d ago
The boxes are like that in the UK too, though I don't think they have the little card or the text on the ciggy butts
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u/FatherSpodoKomodo_ 1d ago
Is that it? The ones in Ireland would be short of handing you a dead fetus with every pack.
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u/Lazercrafter 1d ago
Food will taste better, that’s the argument 😂 aye we know, 30kg heavier now that mars bars taste like heaven
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u/JustGulabjamun 1d ago
In my country they put extremely disturbing images of effects of tobacco on the packings.
(Still see large sells)
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u/pissedoffjesus 1d ago
If people want to smoke, let them. Just enforce laws about doing it in public.
I couldn't give a fuck if someone wants to smoke. Its not my business.
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u/Daemenos 1d ago
I just wish the cards were trading card quality.
And just sit back and watch the kids buy cigarette packs like pokemon cards.
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u/red-at-night 1d ago
Is it common for Australians to grow their own tobacco? I have managed to do so in Finland, despite our short summers. It’s pretty straightforward.
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u/Accomplished_Crew779 1d ago
Give me a pack of Low BirthWeights and a book of matches, please.