They have tried it before and I am sure they will they it again. This time in Australia it is the anti smoking lobby who have become the prohibitionists. Here is a news report on the current Australian black market in tobacco. Talking in billions of dollars of course. They need to stop the prohibition approach it would seem.
THE BILLION dollar illicit tobacco black market has hit a record high as Australian smokers baulk at the price of legal cigarettes.
Criminals are exploiting the high price of legal smokes to make massive profits by smuggling in cheap tobacco from overseas.
Last year 14.5 per cent of all tobacco consumed was illegal, according to a new report.
The Illicit Tobacco in Australia 2014 report states nearly 2.6 million kilograms of illegal tobacco was consumed last year alone with the tobacco black market rocketing by 30 per cent since 2013.
But this time is is prohibition by stealth, they have not sought to have tobacco made illegal but they have sought to make tobacco prohibitively expensive. It seems it gets the same result as the Americans found with alcohol prohibition which made Al Capone a millionaire in the 1930s.
They need to lower the price of cigarettes to stop the prohibitionist approach but the anti smoking lobby I am sure will just seek to have the government increase further the price of cigarettes. The other problem with prohibition is it causes a general decay in society as well. It puts large, indeed very large sums of money in the hands of people who are actively and directly seeking to corrupt public officials. With the ending of any type of prohibition there is also a more generalised cleansing in a society as the money and need for corrupting public officials dries up.