At its second and final reading, the New Zealand House of Representatives passed the proposed law from November 2021 by Jacinda Arden’s Labour Party government banning those who come of age from procuring tobacco and cigarettes and allowing it only to already adult-hooded people born before 2009.
New Zealand has thus banned smoking from buying cigarettes from every younger generation for life, and its government is apparently waiting for cigarettes to disappear from the market over the last generation that would retain the same right to make the country “smoke-free” without any extra work on its part. Something the Labor government still pretends to be scheduled for 2025.
So New Zealanders who voted against legalising cannabis in the 2019 referendum will not have the opportunity to procure and taste even the tobacco and cigarettes that are legal that contain it that obviously comes as a result.
This law, whenever it provides for the same in other countries, is often referred to as a generational endgame for smoking and prohibits young people who come of age now and in the future from obtaining tobacco and cigarettes, allowing smoking and testing it only to people already in adulthood born before 2009, but without also mentioning e-cigarettes and heating tobacco which will continue to be sold to all adult citizens. Of the 5 million New Zealanders and Anglo-Saxon colonisers, 8% smoke, down from 9.4% last year. At the same time, the number of users of electronic substitutes increased from 6.2% to 8.3%.
The tobacco prohibition law will come into force in 2023, depriving New Zealand citizens of their choice and right to choose from it as they take their own individual responsibility. It was first proposed in November 2021 and passed almost unanimously by the New Zealand House of Representatives, since its first reading last July (the upper legislative council last functioned, dissolved and abolished in 1951). The opposing view of one of the opposition parties and the scepticism of the Greens and the main opposition of the New Zealand National Party were not enough to prevent the anti-smoking and smoking bill from being passed.
The country’s associate health minister said last July that “For decades we have been allowing tobacco companies to maintain their market share by making their deadly product increasingly addictive. It’s disgusting and it’s weird. We have more regulations in this country for the safety of selling a sandwich than for a cigarette. We want to ensure that young people never start smoking, so we will make it an offence to sell or supply smoking tobacco products to new groups of young people. People aged 14 when the law comes into force will never be able to legally buy tobacco. Smoking rates plummet. Our goal of being smoke-free by 2025 is achievable.” stating more aptly that there is no safe age to start smoking. Now that the stalled law will take effect in 2023, the associate health minister stated that “Thousands of people will live longer, healthier lives and the health system will be $5 billion better off than not having to treat the disease caused by smoking, such as numerous types of cancer, heart attacks, strokes, amputations.”.
The bill also that became law on the 13th of December, 2022, limits the number of shops that sell tobacco exclusively to already adult citizens at present to 600 of the 6,000 they were, which implies that supermarkets and grocery stores will not sell tobacco instead of tobacconists and gift shops, while requiring the issuance of a special license for the retail sale and trade of tobacco. It also drastically reduces the nicotine contained in available cigarettes exclusively to existing adult citizens by 95%, leaving intact the negligible one twentieth to 5% of the nicotine of cigarettes as they are known in the rest of the world.
Bring Back Smoking Freedom 