New Zealand has banned smoking for future generations with a ban on young people ever buying cigarettes in their lifetime - health authorities welcomed the crackdown but retailers and tobacco companies say it will play into the hands of criminals on the black market...New Zealand bans smoking with young people prevented from EVER buying cigarettesNew Zealand plans to ban young people from ever buying cigarettes in their lifetime in one of the world’s toughest crackdowns on the tobacco industry, arguing that other efforts to extinguish smoking were taking too long. “If nothing changes, it would be decades till Māori smoking rates fall below 5%, and this government is not prepared to leave people behind.”How will New Zealand's smoking ban for young people work? New Zealand’s neighbour Australia was the first country in the world to mandate plain packaging of cigarettes in 2012. Smoking kills about 5,000 people a year in New Zealand, making it one of the country’s top causes of preventable death. “Cigarette smoking kills 14 New Zealanders every day and two out of three smokers will die as a result of smoking,” said New Zealand Medical Association chair Alistair Humphrey in a statement.

Source: Stuff December 10, 2021 03:57 UTC