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.
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.
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.
We learned our lesson during the alcohol prohibition years in America.
We’re not America and we’re not banning alcohol, nor are we banning the drug in tobacco that people smoke it for.
So it is an entirely different scenario to either American prohibition or to cannabis.
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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.
Now that would be fascinating. Britain has a deeply entrenched drinking culture. Regularly getting drunk to the point of vomiting and passing is very common. The managers where I work all live away and stay in hotels when they visit my town every other week. They all go out and get wasted on a Wednesday night (with company funds, totally legitimately) and often don’t come into work Thursday so they can drive home in the afternoon when they sober up. All totally normal.
Ban advertising, pub drinking and cheap supermarket booze. Inflate the price and run a massive anti-drinking campaign. It’d be interesting to see how long it’d take for the tide to turn. Also, if we end up going the way of America during prohibition with illicit alcohol flooding the streets, how long that would take to die down and for people to accept it.
But it’ll never happen. No politician is even going to think about limiting the availability of alcohol in this country. They’d be so unpopular it’d be political suicide for them and their party.
A lot also drink alcohol because it is about the only thing that can help them relax after a shitty day of work in this society.
Inflating the price will have plenty of people on edge, all while those managers can still go on a alcohol bender, just at every 4 weeks instead.
But making it very difficult and expensive to maintain an addictive habit would much better.
Harmful to others habbit.
Alcohol looks acceptable because it’s promoted, advertised and normalized everywhere. If it weren’t, less people would be drinking.
Also alchohol is a drug, that creates dagerous behaviour. And more addictive than some banned drugs.
i will be a cigarette smuggler in this modern age
Practice not being startled.
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Those “control freaks” only exist in your imagination, look at the reality around you. Almost everyone’s up for legalization of cannabis.
Tobacco users however are a huge burden on national health programs (ok except on the US, where people are just expected to cough up all their family’s money before they die idk)
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Totally missed your reply.
“Actual science”?! Show me one single scientific article that defends tobacco usage for depression or anxiety. I’ll be waiting.
As for prohibitionists, if you keep digging for long enough you’re bound to come up with a couple nutjobs that do support banning tobacco. The thing with these fringe extremists is that they’re irrelevant, up until the moment you go up to them and give them a loudspeaker just so that you can come back crying “see I told you they exist, they’re coming for me”.
As for cannabis, note that I brought it up to point out that the “zeitgeist” is NOT prohibition, in fact it’s the opposite. The fact that it’s still illegal in some places speaks more to how out of tune some politicians and even the courts are with the rest of society.
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It’s weird there’s such a push to ban cigarettes while smoking marijuana is becoming more acceptable.
People simply smoke a lot more cigs than pot per day. If you smoked 10-20 joints a day for many years your lungs and body would be wrecked too.
That amount would quite possibly make you unable to continue using weed via Cannabis hyperemesis syndrome. Killed at least two folks too.
Never heard of that before, I will do a little reading. Always nice to learn new things.
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You have an article to link to that, that is peer reviewed by a medical board and scientists that this claim is real?
https://www.cmaj.ca/content/194/46/E1576#:~:text=Andrews’%20study%20was%20the%20first,at%20least%20one%20CHS%20attack.
It’s a real disorder, but we’re just recently getting to the point where it’s even legal to study cannabis use so data is sparse. What we do know is that there’s a subset of heavy users that develop a persistent vomiting disorder and cessation of cannabinoids clears it up. My brother in law’s brother has it and he has to be careful with some chemicals in foods that mimic cannabinoids even.
I don’t find it weird at all. Cannabis is less harmful, less addictive, and subjectively, I find it way more fun.
Tobacco (nicotine) is hyper addictive to the point where people gradually get chemically compelled to smoke just about all the time. Arguably maybe caffeine is similarly compelling (I certainly drink caffeine all day), but most people consider caffeine to be pretty benign. Cigarettes are one of the hardest soft drugs to quit.
The long-term health effects of cannabis probably need to be studied more, but prohibition has actually made it harder to do just that. Now that the laws around weed have relaxed a little bit, it’ll be much easier for people to legitimately do the scientific studies needed to show how cannabis affects the human body, how it affects the mind and mood, how additive it is compared to other common drugs, how it is typically used, and what effects legalization has on society compared to decades of criminalization.
The thing that I find truly weird, and actually pretty upsetting, is that I can stop by one of the many dispensaries around here and pick up weed flower or a 10-pack of cannabis gummies for like 15 bucks, but in other parts of the country there are people sitting in jail for less.
I mean breathing in smoke seems is bad for you no matter what.
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The main difference between cannabis and tobacco is that one is addictive and encourages you to engage in the habit ten or twenty times a day.
Setting plants on fire and inhaling the smoke causes cancer. Doesn’t matter much which plant, though there’s surely some that are worse than these two. Neither one is good for you.
Of course, cannabis is often consumed in other forms (edibles, vaping, etc.).
But it’s the ROA with these two plants that cause the most problems. And outside of frequency of use they’re both carcenoginic.
Yeah…I was addicted to pot and smoked daily for 12 years and I beg to differ.
Beg to differ on what part? Addiction?
Yes, cannabis can be habit forming. But as someone who has used both extensively tobacco addiction doesn’t compare to a cannabis habit. One encourages you to light up ten or twenty times a day and smoke a whole cigarette each time, from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed.
I don’t think I’ve smoked ten bowls in a single day in 30 years of blazing.
If you want to argue as to rather or not the burnt carbon in cannabis is carcinogenic I’d have to dig out some research.
Prohibition causes problems when there aren’t substitutions, but there are less dangerous ways to consume nicotine and less deadly things to smoke.
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.
You drinking alcohol doesn’t affect my health. You smoking cigarettes does - even in your own 4 walls, unless you have a few hundred meters distance from every neighbor. So I do support the idea of completely forbidding smoking - but I concede it’s not very practical and can’t really be done. Forbidding it in public spaces and restaurants / bars however, and whereever smoke will be blown to people who don’t like it? Yes, at least the legislation to enforce that would be very welcome.
Thank you armchair analyst, but governments will move on ignoring you, we dont like lung cancer sorry
The taxes collected through cigarette sales more than cover their costs on the healthcare system. Don’t act like governments actually care about the health of their citizens, either, it’s just about production maximization and writing policy to help their friends.
Ask yourself why full tobacco bans are becoming so popular now, instead of any other time in the past 50 years since we learned how harmful smoking is. It’s because big tobacco companies have pivoted and cornered the E-Cig market now, which is much more profitable than traditional cigarettes. The only difference is that small/independent farms can’t grow disposable vapes like they can with tobacco.
Ask yourself why full tobacco bans are becoming so popular now, instead of any other time in the past 50 years since we learned how harmful smoking is. It’s because big tobacco companies have pivoted and cornered the E-Cig market now, which is much more profitable than traditional cigarettes
You have the cause and effect on this backwards. More and more laws were passed restricting smoking, so number of smokers went down, so companies pivoted to vaping.
Smoking is ok because I can treat my lung cancer from it’s tax money, thank you analyst
Ironic that back in the 50s physicians used to prescribe smoking as a health benefit! 🙄🤣
*Actors acting as physicians on television
It helps against one disease, as far as I know (believe me I’m a doctor.).
The disease is ulcerative colitis.
Fun fact: Alcohol improves symptom of one disease too. The disease is called essential tremor.
Ironic, isnt it?
As far as I’m aware, 1637 is still made in France. Does this article only refer to pre-rolled cigarettes?
As opposed to cigarettes that haven’t been rolled yet? Isn’t that just called tobacco and papers? Pretty sure cigarettes means cigarettes, but I haven’t read the article
Wait, my vision of a man wearing a striped shirt and a beret smoking a cigarette is not actually what French people are like?
No no that’s still accurate, it’s just that the cigarettes are imported now.
Not anymore. It’s all changing for the worse. I hear they’re coming after the baguettes next. The mimes are speechless.
What the FUCK is a French man supposed to do after sex now?
more sex
Roll a doob.
Buy Italian cigarettes?
