Ever feel like you can't keep up with all the doom and gloom echoing around the internet? Motherboard's here to help. With GIFs. Welcome to THIS WEEK IN HELL, a feature that brings you hard-hitting animated coverage of the week's most apocalyptic events, straight from the digital pen of Jay Spahr.Smoking kills. In fact, it kills enough people every year to fill Flavor Country with a zombie army. A pair of researchers posits an aggressive solution: If tobacco taxes were tripled worldwide, we could prevent some 200 million deaths by the end of the century.That's according to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which notes that globally, around 50 percent of young men and 10 percent of young women smoke, and most never quit. That leads to some rather shocking statistics: Study authors Dr. Prabhat Jha and Sir Richard Peto, of the University of Toronto and Oxford, respectively, say 100 million people died tobacco-related deaths in the 20th century. Due to population growth, and despite improved medicine and anti-smoking efforts, that number is projected to balloon to 1 billion in this century.Why's that? Even in nations with advanced healthcare systems, mortality among smokers is two to three times higher than that of non-smokers. So naturally, smoking is a major health concern, and last year the World Health Organization implored governments worldwide to reduce smoking rates by a third by 2025, which the new study authors say would reduce deaths by 200 million by the end of the century.To do so, the authors suggest raising taxes on tobacco products, which many countries do not do despite price increases having been shown to be effective smoking deterrents. "Tripling inflation-adjusted specific excise taxes on tobacco would, in many low- and middle-income countries, approximately double the average price of cigarettes (and more than double prices of cheaper brands), which would reduce consumption by about a third and actually increase tobacco revenues by about a third," they write.If tobacco prices were doubled through increased taxes, the authors say that revenue would amount to about $100 billion a year globally, on top of $300 billion in tobacco tax revenues already collected. The authors also argue that tobacco companies can afford any potential losses, writing that "manufacturers' worldwide profits of about $50 billion in 2012 (approximately $10,000 per tobacco-attributable death) yield enormous political influence that is used, among other things, to try to prevent large tax increases." So even if huge tobacco tax hikes could save hundreds of millions of lives, it's going to be an uphill battle actually putting them in place.@derektmead
Advertisement