“Cigarettes are killing millions of people all over the world and nobody cares”

According to a recent story about a New Zealand Cigarette Ban, very few people in this world actually care about cigarette lung damage. Outside of the people who have already lost a loved one due to the harm that cigarettes cause - like damaging people’s intestines - most people don’t seem to even think about the issue like they once did, and it doesn’t seem like anything is actually being done to address this ongoing health crisis.

Well, that’s not entirely true. As a matter of fact, New Zealand recently came very close to actually doing something about it and banning all cigarette sales, a move that would save thousands of lives every year. 

New Zealand decided to attempt a form of action against cigarettes  after health officials discovered that one in four people in the country smoke tobacco. This, alongside the fact that officials also discovered that roughly eight million deaths, and lung damages are caused by tobacco smoking each year resulted in New Zealand’s new right-hand government enacting a law that will moderately ban all cigarette sales in the country over the course of several decades. 

Sounds good right? New Zealand would be one of the first countries in the UK to ban cigarette smoking. This is a law that will literally save thousands of lives every single year. This is certainly a win for New Zealand, and a model that the rest of the world should follow. Right?

On the contrary, New Zealand’s new government, specifically the new Prime Minister, Chris Luxon, disagreed with the decision of banning cigarette consumption. He argued that the ban of cigarettes would result in illegal sales in their country. These illegal vendors will then be gaining all the money that the country of New Zealand would have been gaining through the tax on cigarette sales. Their economy will definitely be negatively affected by this move. This does not stop Luxon from stating that he and his country would continue education programs and encourage people to use vapes as a tool to help them quit smoking. 

Without saying it directly, Luxon is saying that money is more important than the lives of the citizens of New Zealand. We shouldn’t be surprised, governments and corporations will always choose profits over people. Jasmin Garcia, a senior at Neuwirth is also frustrated with the whole thing: “They should ban cigarettes because the government is gaining too much money and power from the taxes being collected from cigarette sales, while people are out here dying and suffering because they are becoming addicted and it’s the government’s fault because they are providing them for people in order to keep gaining millions of dollars every year.”

New Zealand’s policy reversal brought shock and condemnation from public health officials and anti-tobacco groups, who criticized the new government for prioritizing the economy and the tobacco industry ahead of human lives. Tobacco is killing thousands of people and all the New Zealand government cares about is the enormous amounts of money that they are receiving from just cigarette sales taxes. Does the government actually want to save people’s lives or is money more important to them? 

I guess we’ll never know.