More imposts on liberties and small business?

Jeff Rogut

I wrote last week about the failed ‘fat tax’ in Denmark. The article below again highlights the small interest groups that have little idea about the workings of small business and yet come up with schemes that impact operators. Your business needs to make its voice heard or such thinking may well turn into action and you will be impacted.

Smokers should be forced to have licences to light up, public health professor Simon Chapman says

Lucie van den Berg
Herald Sun
November 15, 2012

SMOKERS should be forced to register for swipe-card licences that limit how many cigarettes they can buy, a leading Australian anti-smoking campaigner says.

University of Sydney professor of public health Simon Chapman said the radical scheme, which would restrict the number of cigarettes a smoker could buy to 50 a day over two weeks, could cut smoking and send a powerful message that tobacco was no ordinary commodity.

Licensees would have to pay a fee and apply for annual renewal, and would be offered a financial incentive to surrender their licences.

A test on the health risks of smoking, similar to a driving test, would be compulsory.

And a database of licensees could be used to direct public health messages.

Prof Chapman wrote in journal PLOS Medicine that a smoking licence was no different from drug prescriptions.

But Jeff Collin, a professor at the University of Edinburgh school of social and political science, said it would make smokers feel like “registered addicts”, increase stigmatisation, marginalise the poor, and “inevitably be widely perceived as demeaning, onerous and punitive.”

Simon Chapman, professor of public health and director of research at the University of Sydney, has suggested smokers have licences to light up.

Quit executive director Fiona Sharkie said a licence was not something it would support in the short term.

It wants the State Government to license tobacco retailers, and ban smoking at outdoor drinking and dining establishments.

Also, a new study has found text and mobile messages can almost double the chance of a smoker quitting.

A Cochrane review analysed five studies in which 9000 smokers trying to quit received motivational messages and advice. Those who used mobile phone programs had up to double the chance of quitting for at least six months.