The New Zealand Government announced yesterday that they intend to prohibit tobacco. Being the mealy-mouthed, gutless scum that they are, they didn’t outright state this. Rather, they obfuscated the fact that tobacco use will effectively become illegal by introducing new regulations that make it technically still legal, but practically all but impossible to get hold of.
The new regulations will make New Zealand one of the most stringently anti-tobacco jurisdictions in the world. In becoming so, New Zealand will pick up the baton once held by Nazi Germany, which was the first country to widely persecute tobacco users on the grounds of public health. The Sixth Labour Government, also being authoritarian socialists, have copied the Nazi idea of prohibiting tobacco out of supposed concern for the public health.
The reality is that tobacco prohibition will be an expensive and pointless failure. This we can say with confidence, because alcohol and cannabis prohibition were also expensive and pointless failures. So why is Labour going through with a policy that obviously won’t work?
As the great historian Basil Henry Liddell Hart wrote in Why Don’t We Learn from History?, one of the main reasons why politicians keep making mistakes is that they keep denying reality. Politicians denied that alcohol played a role in good mental health by facilitating sociability. They also denied that cannabis was a psychiatric medicine that alleviated anxiety and depression. Both of these denials of reality, motivated by puritanical authoritarianism, led to enormous suffering.
The fact is that tobacco is an excellent medicine for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This reality is denied by today’s politicians, who parrot the addiction myth promulgated by puritanical authoritarians. But it’s well understood by the many people who use tobacco to treat the suffering associated with conditions like PTSD, C-PTSD and schizophrenia. It had been understood by most people for centuries, until the addiction narrative took root.
What people who use tobacco to treat the symptoms of psychiatric conditions understand is that prohibition simply doesn’t work.
It didn’t work for alcohol – alcohol prohibition simply created a black market that empowered criminal empires and led to countless deaths. It didn’t work for cannabis – cannabis prohibition simply created a black market that empowered criminal empires and led to countless deaths. It won’t work for tobacco either.
There is already a black market for tobacco in New Zealand, and it’s estimated to comprise 11.5% of the size of the total market. That hasn’t yet led to criminal empires and countless deaths – but it will. This is inevitable.
By making tobacco a high-value item, instead of the low-value item it is when freely traded on the legal market, the Government has created an incentive for the black market to supply it. This means, instead of being mostly sold by retailers like dairies, criminals will move in and dominate the tobacco trade. The predictable consequence of this is more violent crime.
Another predictable consequence of prohibiting tobacco is that the suicide rate will skyrocket. Although it’s denied by the political class, tobacco is a mental health medicine, and many New Zealanders are only just hanging in there thanks to the solace it offers. A ban on tobacco will force these already mentally vulnerable people to go cold turkey. This will make them act impulsively and irrationally.
Yet another predictable consequence is that future tourist receipts will plummet. Why would a tobacco user choose to vacation in a country where tobacco is prohibited? They’d rather go almost anywhere else. Tourists rarely visit countries that have alcohol prohibition, because those places are horrible, soulless hellholes. Unfortunately for us, that’s how many tourists will now perceive New Zealand.
It might seem incredible that the Sixth Labour Government came to power in 2017 with the promise to stop persecuting medicinal cannabis users, but instead expanded the War on Drugs to include tobacco.
The simple explanation is that the Sixth Labour Government are authoritarian. This is why they refuse to countenance returning freedoms to the New Zealand people, but are quick to take freedoms away. They came to power in 2017 promising to allow Kiwis the right to use medicinal cannabis, but instead took away our firearms rights, our free assembly rights and now our free speech rights and our rights to use tobacco medicinally.
As George Orwell wrote, the future is a boot stomping on a human face, forever. New Zealand voters in 2017 might never have guessed that the boot would be worn by a breeding-age woman, but that’s the sort of surprise that the ruling class likes to throw the people’s way to keep us off-balance.
Understanding the Sixth Labour Government is as simple as understanding authoritarian socialists stomping down the people and the brainless NPCs who applaud it. This week’s announcement of the intention to prohibit tobacco will achieve no other purpose than to show the New Zealand people who their masters are. It will cause more suffering than it alleviates.
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