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The Forum > Article Comments > Don’t quit, we’re addicted to your suffering > Comments

Don’t quit, we’re addicted to your suffering : Comments

By Duncan Graham, published 21/8/2017

Indonesia is one of just eight countries that’s neither a signatory nor a party to the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

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Who cares about Indonesia?
If you really care about smokers dying, (and I really shouldn't have to point out that issues in our country are far more relevant) then consider that the governments should use some of the taxes it made off smokers when they smoked, and offer them low cost nicotine patches that would enable them to give up.

And how much more do we pay for cigarettes than Indonesians?

Why does the government not do this?
Answer: Because they make too much money off people who are addicted to smoking to genuinely want them to give up.
Follow the money.

Smokers taxes in Australia go towards paying for the health care of the rest of the country.
Posted by Armchair Critic, Monday, 21 August 2017 11:08:13 AM
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Sort of reminds me of a elderly lady visiting a Doctor, with a really serious wind problem! But was comforted by the fact it at least didn't smell. And therefore she was grateful for small blessings.

Anyhow, the doc wrote her a script and said, come back and see me in a fortnight. A fortnight later she was there with a full burka complaining, please explain, the wind was no better, but now it smelled to high heaven! She was thoroughly mortified and couldn't be seen in public showing her face, hence the disguise.

Right responded the doc, scribbling on his prescription pad, that's got the nose fixed, now let''s see what we can do about the wind.

Levity aside, this is what happens when folks who know not what they do, or just how disgusting they smell, labour under a false premise!

When enough hospitals are full to overflowing with the dead and dying all with tanned lungs as the evidence of the cause of their health problems, something might be done officially?

In the interim, be advised to hold your breath! As long as you're downwind of any of those (there's a sucker on the end of every one of those) demented devotees!

Quitting is easy! But you have to really and truly want to!
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Monday, 21 August 2017 11:21:11 AM
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Well, Indonesia is not Australia, as Duncan Graham well knows. Public health policy is far less developed, and far less resourced, than in that high tax-revenue western country to its south-east. The social priorities in Indonesia are not the same. So the anti-smoking lobby is behind a number of eight-balls right from the start.

A combination of education, legislated restrictions on advertising and marketing products defined as harmful, and punitive taxation, can effectively reduce smoking rates (I think from memory only 13 per cent of Australians now smoke).

Yes, cigarettes are "cheap" in Indonesia compared to elsewhere, but incomes are also very much lower. "A whisker over one Aussie dollar" buys a lot else besides a packet of smokes. And that's usually where scarce family rupiahs are spent: on something else.

Indonesia, to the extent that it absorbs policy ideas from outside at all, does so largely from other Asian societies. Somebody commented in this thread "who cares about Indonesia". The attitude here in Indonesia is "who cares about Australia" - and, by extension, its propensity to offer gratuitous advice to others.

I'm sure that as education levels rise, and employment opportunities outside the largely informal micro- to small-enterprise sector grow, Indonesia will adopt (and be able to pay for) public policies that will address smoking and other pernicious habits, as defined.

The tobacco companies will ultimately pay the price of that shift here as they have elsewhere. In the meantime, polluted urban and rural air (not from tobacco but from other carcinogenic emissions), inadequate nutrition, ineffective and under-resourced public health care, bad roads and any number of other potentially fatal risks will continue to take their toll.

Reducing one elective way of ultimately killing yourself is probably less of a priority than elsewhere in those prevailing conditions.
Posted by Scribe, Monday, 21 August 2017 12:51:49 PM
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I understand that darling of the Australian left, East Timor, is up there with Indonesia for smoking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_in_East_Timor advises

"Smoking in East Timor is highly common...An estimate 33% of the population smoke daily, with 61% of East Timorese men who use tobacco products regularly.

Although it is required that packaging display warnings, this is rendered largely ineffective by the large amount of East Timorese adults who cannot read. There is very little restriction on Tobacco advertisement and it is common to see teachers and students smoking in school.

Former President and independence activists Xanana Gusmão is himself a heavy smoker...

As with neighboring Indonesia tobacco advertisement is prevalent and cigarettes are cheap, only around 25 cents per pack." Making East Timor a paradise for Australian smokers on the left.
Posted by plantagenet, Thursday, 24 August 2017 11:35:04 AM
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