Does is true in New Zealand banned cigarettes for 2008

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I think that this is a good thing New Zealand is doing. Smoking causes serious harm to the body. There are some people who go through life without quitting. It also does a number on your wallet as well.

Update: The proposed smoking restrictions have been introduced in the New Zealand parliament. Last week the bill passed its first reading, and it will now be debated in select committee with submissions from the public also heard.

It will take a few months before the select committee produces its report, plus the bill will need to pass two more readings before it can become law, probably by late December 2022 or early 2023. A lot of the restrictions won't come into effect until 1 January 2027 though.

Additional information:
1. Summary + full text of the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill
2. Government press release supporting the bill
3. ACT Party press release opposing the bill

I dont know if its right or not.

But its certainly a cleverly constructed law.

I have never met a smoker who took up the habit as an adult.

All smokers get started at it as teens in school. And then they get addicted, and cant quit.

So the law is written to stop teens, but allow the poor schmucks who already hooked on nicotine to be free of prosecution, and free of persecution, and to be gradually 'grandfathered' out of the system.

'grandfathered'?
I had to check to dictionary i know the word but need to remember it, you mean that for older generation would not apply.

It's a bit perverse and a bit unfair to give old people more privileges.

This is happening in New Zenlandia, but I do not know if if it happened in Poland, and some newly minted 18-year-old boy, he would not want to be brought before our Polish Supreme Court, and in fact our Constitutional Tribunal, and if he wanted to prove that the principle enshrined in the Polish constitution the equality of all citizens has not been broken, probably our Polish government would also argue that leftist f*****g that they only progressively increase the age at which you can buy cigarettes by one year, which in fact boils down to the fact that people born in a specific year will not could legally buy cigarettes, probably Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his colleagues from the FSB would be delighted to be able to satisfy the pissed off young generation of Poles

By the way, our Polish Constitutional Tribunal has heavily castrated the anti-Covid regulations introduced by the Polish government and has not swallowed their s**t, think about children and s**t like this

In this case, I think he meant that people who were exempted would eventually "retire" (i.e., die off), and in time the only people remaining would be the ones who are banned from smoking.


Funny you should say this: there's another bill being debated in the New Zealand parliament about lowering the voting age from 18 to 16.

Supporters argue that it's "unfair" to give people 18 years and older more privileges than 16- and 17-year-olds, when the latter are already allowed to do things like leave school to work (and pay taxes), drive a car, fill out passport forms on their own, legally consent to sex, or own a gun.

That said, a large majority of NZers still seem to support keeping the voting age at 18. This is also the age when people can legally purchase alcohol (and, for the moment, tobacco products), get married without needing court approval, or legally request euthanasia. Most people have either left school or are leaving school by that time as well.

Yes. Its a term used in the English speaking world for rules that apply to...folks who do X after date Y, but allow folks who are already doing X to keep on doing it- because its too much trouble for them to change- and they will eventually stop it anyway. Like a law that all cars made after X model year must have catalytic converters, but if you already drive an older car we are not gonna confiscate your car, and we will just let you wear the car out from use- so eventually all cars on the road will have catalylitic converters because the older ones will be replaced soon anyway, or whatever.

I wonder if New Zealanders will manage to eliminate smoking among their population, due to the fact that young people will not be able to start smoking even at the age of 18.

I don't like smokers and I don't like when someone smokes in my presence, unless it's weed, although it's not entirely legal in my country

But I also do not like top-down imposing some laws or restrictions, like in the Middle Ages where a moron dressed in some extravagant clothes and says "We the king decided that from today you will do this and that

"You king, it's you, but f**k you"

But I would laugh if this law, the authorities of New Zendland, turned against them, in the sense that consumption would not only not drop but soar upwards like inflation in Poland or the indicators of the Geiger Muller counter in Chernobyl just after the core melted

It's nice to see how the power is introduced by some restrictions on civil rights and people don't give a s**t!

I don't know if NZ can eliminate smoking entirely, but they might be able to minimise its prevalence to around 1–5% of the adult population. There's been a steady downward trend for smoking and restrictions are only being increased gradually, with little public opposition. So I can't imagine NZers suddenly taking up the habit again en masse.

I don't know if NZ is banning cigarettes or not, but I personally wouldn't be shedding any nicotine-laced tears if they did. Cigarettes and the companies that make them are evil. They killed my father, assaulted my mother, and molested my brother and me.

So why not just forbid cigarettes just like that, without dividing society into "privileged" and "non-privileged"?

^ I don't think it's particularly unfair to "divide" society with age-based restrictions for certain "privileges". It already happens with cigarettes, buying alcohol, owning a gun, driving, voting, etc. The only difference in this case will be the actual legal age itself, which for smoking would effectively go up each year.

In addition, there's a risk that a complete and immediate ban on smoking could lead to too many businesses losing income and shutting down all at once. It could also put pressure on quit-smoking services if there was a sudden increase in the number of clients, or if a lot of smokers (especially elderly ones) started going through nicotine withdrawal en masse.

New Zealand seems to be going for a more gradual ban instead, allowing businesses and current smokers more time to adapt, while trying to prevent future generations from taking up the habit in the first place. I'm guessing that a total and immediate ban might be too difficult to implement in practice. Perhaps a total ban deferred for 10 or 20 years could be effective, who knows? Anyways, we'll see how New Zealand's approach goes first.

Update: NZ's anti-smoking legislation has now passed its 3rd and final reading in Parliament, and should soon be signed into law:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/48 ... parliament

There are three main changes:
1. Reducing the number of stores nationwide that sell tobacco by 90% to a maximum of 600 by the end of next year
2. Reducing the amount of nicotine in tobacco products over the next couple of years
3. Starting now, no-one born on or after 1 January 2009 may ever purchase or consume tobacco products in NZ

I wrote about it with one of my friends who also has Asperger's, I don't actually know the guy but I write with him as with you on this one forum (but on other forum not that one )
He wrote to me that although this does not apply to him because he is not a New Zealander and yes, I am well over 30, according to him, these rules of yours are just as old as the anti-covid restrictions of the Polish government, and from what he read, in New Zealand and Australia they were more authoritarian than in the EU.
He wrote to me that he was once beaten with a police club while attending an anti-lockdown assembly

He wrote to me that he doesn't smoke and never will, but he was once arrested as a kid for smoking weed, which is illegal in Poland for a change

He wrote to me that if he was born in your country, and he was born after 2009, he would probably start smoking only on principle, because why does some dick older than him a year have the right to smoke and he doesn't say why some senile old man pees what smells like urine because he doesn't hold it anymore he has the right to smoke and he doesn't, that either they are supposed to be equally f****d or no one.

He wrote to me that it's like with these covid certificates that morons who take an untested vaccine can walk without a mask even though they also infect, and normal people who do it before the government introduced official regulations have more rights, but they are submissive to the government, and what those in power care most

He wrote to me that, paradoxically, the fact that we border both Ukraine and Russia now even has advantages if our Polish government introduced equally f*****g authoritarian laws as your New Zealand politicians.

This friend wrote to me that he is subcutaneously sensitive to the authoritarian anti-democratic tendencies of every government that he has a psychiatric diagnosis when he was arrested for possession of weed, in addition to Asperger's and ADHD he is also diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, which in his opinion has its advantages

Seems quite clever to me. What you never had you never miss, they say. Avoids increasing the cost by trying to tax it out of existence, so those who are already hopelessly addicted and poor won't be bankrupted, assuming they haven't eliminated poverty yet. True that people who make money out of selling tobacco won't suddenly be out of a job, but I don't much care about them anyway, assuming they chose to make killing people their livelihood. They'd just have to find a more socially-worthy way of making a living. I suppose that should be easier in a left-wing country anyway. And I don't much care if a few young people feel bad about old people being allowed to smoke tobacco.

Not so sure about reducing the nicotine content of cigarettes. When I was a smoker I'd smoke more if I only had low-nicotine cigarettes, to get more nicotine into my blood, so the cancer risk would go up. But maybe I'm unusual.

I can see from your profile that you are quite old, so you probably have more life experience than me, but if you are on a website for people with Aspergers, you probably also have Aspergers

I'm wondering if we have people with autism, if someone is already on the autism spectrum, does it increase the chances that they also have another psychological disorder?
For example, my friend who has both autism and ADHD also has oppositional defiant disorder sometimes I think I have it too

Sometimes I also think that someone with authority will set some rule that everyone has to stick to because that's how this person came up with it and that's how it's supposed to be, then I, like my friend, sometimes want to show my middle finger and say "f**k you and your rules!"

Yes I do. Medium level, late diagnosis.


Some research suggests a greater prevalence of some psych disorders in Aspies, particularly those who were diagnosed late, but I don't know how seriously to take it. I've not personally had anybody specifically test me for anything but ASD, but I asked my ASD diagnostician who replied that she'd probably have noticed if I had anything serious. Anxiety and depression seem to be the commonest, but I've never been clinically depressed and my occasional anxiety is relatively mild and mostly seems caused by having to do things that Aspies could be expected to feel anxious about, so I don't view that as a separate clinical condition in me. I've also heard ADHD is common in Aspies but I suspect it's hard to tell in many cases what attention problems are purely down to ASD and which are truly ADHD, because it's a common ASD trait to have a lot of trouble paying attention to things we're not naturally interested in. But I don't know much about ADHD so I'm only speculating. If I seriously thought I had non-ASD attention problems then I might look into a diagnosis, but I've not seen any evidence, in my own case. Certainly I'm not clinically impulsive, my temper is under better control than most, I don't strain people's patience very much AFAIK, I don't miss appointments, I did quite well academically and in jobs, and I'm quite good at solving problems.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-con ... c-20350883
It's also said to be difficult to diagnose in adults and I suspect good diagnosticians are rare.


I don't know much about ODD, and I'm suspicious of it because resistance to authority is said to be part of it, which raises the question, who decides when an authority deserves to be obeyed? Aspies often have problems with authority figures in any case, perhaps because we think more independently than NTs. I suppose for ODD to be an actual condition there would have to be more evidence than the occasional bit of defiant hot air from an adult. I know (and know of) many people who I think would willingly bring down a government that wasn't of their own political persuasion if they knew how to. I myself would do that to the UK Tory Party if I could. But if you or your friend showed a lot of the symptoms listed here:
https://exploringyourmind.com/oppositio ... in-adults/
then maybe you're right.

From the point of view of the discussion of New Zealand's new smoking laws, it's interesting that anybody would go so far as bothering to stick two fingers up to a government of a country they had no plans to go to, but many normal people like to offer their judgement on more or less any law in any country - self included, if somebody happens to ask - and some people can be rather colourful when they're expressing strong political views. I guess it's such things as the degree of anger and practical obstructiveness that may be a useful touchstones.