France to quit making cigarettes as last factory prepares to close The last remaining factory making cigarettes in France is set to close by the end of 2023, the site’s owner told its employees this week.
Issued on: 01/10/2023 - 09:08
The Manufacture Corse des Tabacs (Macotab), on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, is the last to manufacture cigarettes in France since the closure of another in the centre of the country in 2016.
Around 30 employees work at the Corsican site, down from 143 in the early 1980s.
The factory makes cigarettes on behalf of industry giant Philip Morris, which recently signalled it was ending the contract.
Contraband packets have also cut into legal sales, according to the factory’s owner Seita, the former French state-owned tobacco monopoly that is now part of the British company Imperial Tobacco.
Seita had already closed France’s last tobacco processing factory in 2019, in the traditional growing region of the Dordogne in the south-west.
Some former factories in Marseille and Lyon have found new as cultural and exhibition spaces, or even a university.
Kicking the habit Efforts by authorities to curb smoking and its health hazards, not least by prohibiting puffing in restaurants and cafes and banning ads for cigarettes, have prompted sharp reductions in cigarette sales in recent years.
Smoking remains the main cause of avoidable deaths in France, according to Santé Publique France health agency, which estimates 75,000 tobacco deaths each year.
The bulk of European production these days is in Germany and Poland.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. You can’t get everyone to just stop, so you do the less bad thing and things are better.
Pretending that abstinence is the only good solution is lazy and harmful. People are not as simple as a sudoku, and the solutions to helping them are complicated and imperfect.
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And create a black market. Now people are still addicted to nicotine and have to deal with criminals to get their previously socially acceptable* fix. Good job, you made it worse.
As I said. Abstinence (and variations thereof) is a stupid and lazy solution, typically asserted by people in positions of privilege who lack the empathy to understand that it isn’t that simple or easy.
Do better.
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Way to read the comment my dude. At no point did I say that smoking was good for you or advocate for it in any way. Those are lovely words you put in my mouth.
The point you missed is that humans are complicated, addiction is complicated, and shit simple solutions fed to the suffering masses from on high help no one. And as your example lampshades, sometimes makes it worse. Have we won the war on drugs yet?
Harm reduction has value and is more effective to ultimately get you what you want. It is not the fault of me or anyone else that the (provably) better solution to a difficult problem is distasteful and too slow for your taste.
Making things illegal does not make them go away, it makes them hide. Problems don’t get solved in the shadows.