Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

Let’s get one thing straight: It would be fantastic if New Zealanders didn’t smoke.Our Smokefree 2025 aspirations, although perhaps a smidgen optimistic, are excellent. The steps we’ve taken over the last few decades, from advertising restrictions to plain packaging laws, excise tax hikes to the recent ban on smoking in cars, have made a massive difference to the number of New Zealanders who smoke cigarettes. I look back to the childhood evenings I spent in rugby clubrooms, heavy with a fog of cigarette smoke, and it feels like a different life.But I do have some reservations about the phased-in ban on cigarette sales. Restricting drug access can have unintended consequences. Would we have seen the surge in dairies being robbed in violent robberies if we hadn’t massively increased excise taxes? Of course not. And more broadly, does banning drug use ever work? In my experience, human-beings will always find a way to get an illicit fix. If you ban anything, you automatically create illegal demand. And the black