Last month, I spent about 18 days at my cottage in Canada. I have a few friends there who smoke cigarettes and over the last few years I’ve brought back empty cigarette packages with the plan to post about them on EconLog. I’ve never got around to it until now.
The typical cigarette package has on it, prominently, a picture of one of the most horrible consequences of smoking cigarettes for years. See the top cigarette pack in the picture above. The cigarette companies are required by law to show those pictures. The idea, presumably, is to make people so disgusted that they won’t buy them. Whether it works I don’t know. My guess is that it works on the margin.
Anyway, last month, I was visiting two neighbors who smoke and one of them had the bottom cigarette package in the picture above. I noticed how clean it was: no government warnings, no awful pictures.
I asked him where he got it. He said that a woman in a bar sold it to him. Can you guess where it was sold originally? On a First Nations reserve in Canada. The federal government has less power there and so it can’t legally require cigarette sellers on the reserve to carry those pictures or negative messages.
We normally think of a government denying freedom of speech by legally prohibiting someone from speaking. But just as important, and possibly more important, is a government denying freedom of speech by requiring people to say something that they would rather not.
So there’s slightly more freedom of speech in Canada than I had thought.
Postscript: One thing that surprised me years ago, given how long the government’s propaganda campaign has been going, is the absence of a thriving aftermarket for special cigarette cases that can hold 25 cigarettes, the number in a typical pack. But the reason is possibly self-selection. The people badly turned off by the message are no longer buying cigarettes or never bought them. The ones who keep buying the cigarettes either don’t care or are only mildly annoyed and so they don’t bother going through the hassle of transferring the cigarettes to another container.
Update:
Alan Goldhammer, in the first comment below, asks a question that I should have answered in the original post. Canadian governments tax cigarettes heavily. It turns out, though, that contrary to what I had thought, the really heavy taxes are at the provincial level. Here are the rates for Ontario.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
Aug 9 2019 at 7:54am
Do they have the same federal taxes on the First Indian reserve? Curious as to why someone would go purchase cigarettes there just for the different packaging.
David Henderson
Aug 9 2019 at 9:43am
Good question. No, they don’t. That came out in our conversation. And because the feds tax so heavily there, that’s a huge difference to arbitrage.
Alan Goldhammer
Aug 9 2019 at 10:35am
Given the lack of taxation, it would be interesting to know what the smoking rate is among residents of the reserve. You have a good control group to study whether high cigarette taxes deter smoking (I think we partially know the answer to this).
JayT
Aug 9 2019 at 12:58pm
Do you know if it is legal for a person that isn’t associated with the First Nation to buy the cigarettes from them? Or is that considered a black market?
François Paquette
Aug 9 2019 at 2:05pm
It is not legal, but widely done and not prosecuted.
David Henderson
Aug 9 2019 at 7:41pm
What Francois said. It is illegal but hard to enforce.
DeservingPorcupine
Aug 9 2019 at 7:26pm
Either desensitization happens, or it doesn’t.
If it does, any effect these pictures have is fleeting. If it doesn’t, then nanny arguments about, say, video games desensitizing one to violence, fall apart.
Obviously, one can put forth a theory of desensitization that carves the world just right for the nannies, but I’d wager any such theory will be embarrassingly ad hoc.
BC
Aug 10 2019 at 2:36am
How does one draw the line between free speech and full disclosure? Are all disclosure requirements to ensure that consumers have all material information to make an informed purchase (or that investors have all material information to make informed investment decisions) always an infringement on free speech rights? What about requirements that government officials, company employees, advisors and counselors, and others disclose potential conflicts of interest?
David Henderson
Aug 10 2019 at 4:29pm
You ask:
I don’t think they all are. So, for example, if a magazine that writes about finance requires that a journalist touting a particular stock disclose if he has holdings of the stock, that’s simply a contractual matter between the magazine and the journalist.
But if a government agency requires that a company state a warning on a package, that is an infringement on freedom of speech.
You might argue that the downside of no infringement is that more people will get away with selling snake oil. To that I have three responses: (1) that doesn’t make it less of an infringement, even if it means the infringement is justified; (2) there will be a market response once it’s widely understood that no warnings are required–private organizations such as Yelp will crop up to provide information; (3) if you give the government the power to require such warnings because of the dangers, it’s hard to argue against giving government the power to give warnings about dangerous ideologies such as Fascism, Naziism, and Communism: should the government require a warning on Mein Kampf or The Communist Manifesto and if not, why not?
Andre
Aug 10 2019 at 12:01pm
“So there’s slightly more freedom of speech in Canada than I had thought.”
Huh? How’s that? It’s not Canada that has the freedom of speech, it’s the First Nations reserve that does. It looks like a loophole. Unless I’m missing something.
David Henderson
Aug 10 2019 at 4:07pm
The First Nation reserves are part of Canada. That’s why the adjective “slightly.”
Andre
Aug 11 2019 at 8:56am
Yes, I get that. But I assume they are a slightly different political entity, and their additional rights don’t confer to other Canadians. Except through cigarette package sales and the like.
David Henderson
Aug 11 2019 at 10:43am
Correct.
Comments are closed.