Chris Selley: OK, we’ve won on stigmatizing tobacco. Why not try it for hard drugs?

Unlike several other wars one could name, the war on smoking has accomplished what it set out to do quite spectacularly, and without resorting to outright bans, Chris Selley suggests. Photo by Tim Miller/Belleville Intelligencer/Postmedia

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This week, I overheard an unusual conversation: A fellow at my local branch of a certain Quebec-based convenience store colossus asked for two packs of a brand of cigarettes I had actually heard of. (It comes in a red pack. It is made by Imperial Tobacco. It is named after Daphne du Maurier’s father. Under Canadian law, I don’t think I’m allowed to say any more.)

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It’s unusual enough to hear people ask for smokes at the corner store nowadays, more unusual still to hear them ask for what Big Tobacco now calls “premium brands” — which as far as I can remember is what people used to just call “cigarettes.”

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When I do see people buy cigarettes in traditional retail outlets like convenience stores, it mostly seems to be the “discount” brands that predominate (they are generally made by the same Big Tobacco companies as make the legacy brands). I’m not surprised. I have never been a smoker, but with a snack and a drink thrown in with his 50 cigarettes that guy spent roughly what people my age remember spending on a tank of gas in the 1990s. The mind boggles. Even the cheap brands aren’t remotely cheap by historical standards.

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Every such transaction is fitting testament, I suppose, to the magnificently addictive power of nicotine. But it’s also testament to governments’ weirdly unrelenting efforts to double down on tobacco restrictions, despite their demonstrably roaring success and what must surely be diminishing returns on investment.

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Say what you will about the war on smoking. Unlike several other wars one could name, not least against other forms of addiction, it has accomplished what it set out to do quite spectacularly, and without resorting to outright bans.

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According to World Health Organization statistics, in the year 2025, 10.8 per cent of Canadians regularly consumed tobacco products. Among OECD nations, only Colombia can claim a lower figure, and plenty of our friends in peer nations still smoke at astonishing rates: 30 per cent of Portuguese, 29 per cent of Greeks, 27 per cent of Spaniards.

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Dive behind the former Iron Curtain and Canadian eyes start properly stinging. According to the WHO, slightly fewer than 40 per cent of Serbians smoke. I challenge anyone to fly to Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla Airport, observe the behaviour of the alighting passengers, and tell me that’s not a wild underestimate.

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Canada’s smoking rates, like those of our peer countries’, have in general been plummeting. Sixty years ago, the figure in Canada was roughly 50 per cent. And I wouldn’t suggest we accept success and down tools. But more price and public-health signals on the cigarettes people buy at the corner store do seem rather beside the point, when contraband cigarettes now command a huge share of the market precisely because of those signals — especially, I suspect, cost.