Bum a smoke?
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Perhaps not so easily, once tax increases announced this week come into effect, according to a handful of smokers in Canberra’s city centre.
The Canberra Times spoke to a number of people out smoking around Garema Place and the bus interchange in Civic following Thursday’s announcement that the price of a packet of cigarettes would jump by up to $5 per packet over the next three years, putting the price of individual cigarettes at close to a dollar a smoke.
While most smokers said the price increase alone probably wouldn’t be enough to make them stop, many said they might think twice about handing out cigarettes to others.
Civic worker Michael Vassiliotis said he would probably still give out occasional cigarettes, depending on the situation, but believed that about “80 per cent” of people would stop and think twice before handing one over for nothing.
“A dollar here, a dollar there – I don’t really mind about a dollar,” he said. “I’d give them a smoke. It would affect them in the sense it’s a dollar a cigarette, but it depends, I think, on the surroundings.”
But Leslie Hockey, a hospitality worker, said the price increase would probably make it much harder to bum a smoke.
“If people can’t find their own, they’ll have a really hard time. I won’t give it away for a dollar a cigarette,” he said.
Mitchell Hooper, a 22-year-old who goes through about half a pack a day, said he feels like he already gives away too many cigarettes to friends, and that the price increase would definitely impact on his generosity.
“It’s too expensive. They’re already too expensive,” he said. “I probably would think about quitting, yes.”
Twenty-three-year-old Alix, who is trying to cut down her cigarette consumption, said she avoided smoking in public much of the time because the amount of people looking to score a free smoke was already “a nuisance”.
But she believes the price increase won’t deter smokers, and won’t put an end to the camaraderie of small groups of social smokers huddled outside nightclubs and offices.
“It might stop some people, but they’ve increased it heaps before, and people are still smoking. They just try and budget it around that, I guess – I know I did. I don’t like smoking, I say as I smoke, but I don’t think it will have too much of an effect,” she said.
“If you end up in a group of smokers and you’re out being social, that’s a different issue…At the club, people are out to be very social, so it won’t change even if they’ve got the tax increases.”
Another Civic worker, Brett, said he would always lend a mate a cigarette so long as he was smoking, and said tax increases can’t end what is ultimately an addiction.
“An addiction is an addiction, it shouldn’t be undervalued more than any other addiction,” he said. “The amount of money being pumped into getting people off other addictions is phenomenal…why aren’t we as a society pumping more money into getting people off [cigarettes]?”