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.
While I support bans in restaurants and cafes, I don’t support prohibition, which is what a lot of Western nations are aiming at. We learned our lesson during the alcohol prohibition years in America, and for the last 70 years around the world with marijuana prohibition. The social effects are far worse when forcing recreational drugs underground. Educate support addiction programs, but don’t ban.
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Prohibition causes problems when there aren’t substitutions, but there are less dangerous ways to consume nicotine and less deadly things to smoke.
I agree … Prohibition doesn’t work.
But making it very difficult and expensive to maintain an addictive habit would much better.
The same would go for alcohol. If alcohol was more regulated, more controlled, not sold in public houses or businesses (including bars) and the price increased, taxed more with taxes going towards addiction treatment, education and medical assistance for those affected by alcohol … less people would drink alcohol.
If you have a culture where you freely allow businesses to promote, sell and provide an addictive substance that provides little to no health benefit … especially if it makes high profits … companies will want to encourage a culture of making their substance widely acceptable.
Alcohol looks acceptable because it’s promoted, advertised and normalized everywhere. If it weren’t, less people would be drinking.
Advertising of smoking is highly regulated and discouraged now … smoking is no longer normalized … which is why people smoke less.
Ban use in public in general. I don’t want to be forced to walk through a cloud of cigarette smoke in front of a train station or waiting at a traffic light any more than in a restaurant. People can do what they want at home but constantly having to deal with drug addicts polluting the air around me shouldn’t be accepted.
Now do cars
Bruh keep it in your fuck cars community. The rest of the world has bigger shit to deal with.