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Originally Posted by PeteMoss
Do you think smoking won't decrease in the long run as a result of this? There's a lot more people who smoke and/or drink constantly than do illegal drugs - I assume a lot of that is just ease of acquiring the product.
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Higher taxes & overall price increases seems to be resulting in less people smoking.
However, it is also leading to more people vaping, which I'm not sure is good or bad? Seems to me we shouldn't be discouraging one behavior while encouraging another, and instead we should focus on overall education to get people to stop smoking.
Anyone remember the Tips from Former Smokers thing that was happening in schools in the early 2000s?
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The Tips From Former Smokers® (Tips®) campaign shows real people living with serious long-term health effects from smoking and secondhand smoke exposure. Tips also features compelling stories from family members who take care of loved ones affected by a smoking-related disease or disability.
From 2012–2018, CDC estimates that more than 16.4 million people who smoke have attempted to quit and approximately one million have successfully quit because of the Tips campaign.
Smokers who have seen Tips ads report greater intentions to quit within the next 30 days, and smokers who have seen the ads multiple times have even greater intentions to quit.
During 2012–2018, CDC’s Tips From Former Smokers campaign helped prevent an estimated 129,000 early deaths and helped save an estimated $7.3 billion in smoking-related healthcare costs.
For every $3,800 spent on the Tips campaign between 2012-2018, we prevented an early death. A cost-effectiveness studyexternal icon on the topic factored in smoking relapse, inflation, and advertising and evaluation costs.
In each campaign, there was an immediate, sustained and dramatic spike in calls to 1-800-QUIT-NOW, and in visits to the campaign website.
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https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign...t-results.html
I remember former smokers coming into school and talking to us kids about smoking, and some very gruesome looking pictures & stories being told.
The other thing is that the health care costs for smoking are not going away for a long time, and therefore it is in our best interest to allow smoking trends to continue to drop, but at the same time collect maximum amount of tax revenue to offset the cost. Sounds wrong, but unfortunately this is a must in order to ease the burden on the health care system.