Box 4.

Attitudes to tobacco taxation and price

• Encouraging smuggling
• If they don't want this sort of society then they shouldn't have gone about their business the way they did . . . It's obvious if people can find a way to get cheaper fags they'll do it, you know, and if the government's price wasn't that high, it wouldn't be such a problem (M43).
• Encouraging smoking
• With the amount of bootleg cigarettes . . . it's just encouraging you even more to keep smoking with these people getting a hold of all these cheap cigarettes and tobacco from other countries. So putting the prices up is really not going to make any difference (F21).
• Addiction and lack of cessation support
• If you were a drug addict for twenty five years, you'd get help to stop, to come off the drugs, but they don't give you help just now with stopping. It's all revenue for the government, that's the problem. They tell you to stop smoking on the one hand but they throw cigarettes down your throat with the next hand (M22).
• I believe the government should be doing more. Instead of putting prices up, which they are doing every budget . . . If you're addicted to something, you'll pay whatever it takes to get that item (F14).
• Addiction and regressive taxation
• You're paying tax on everything . . . and to claim that tax off the smokers is quite bad . . . There's people out there that are on crap money with the dole, hooked on fags. They've got to buy fags and they end up there's nothing left for them or their kids' dinner or that, because it's all got to go on the fags . . . There's enough smokers that they could make a healthy whack, they don't need to be greedy . . . and it's not all going back in to public spending (M17).
• Well I mean considering the fact that all the money the government's . . . putting on fags, if that money was solely to go back in to the health care area, fair do's, but you know it doesn't (M11).