31 May is World No Tobacco Day, thanks to the World Health Organization.

If you could ask someone close to you to stop smoking, who would you ask? How would you say it?

Tobacco is dangerous.

On World No Tobacco Day, the WHO presents special awards to organizations or people who have made great efforts to get people, especially children, to stop smoking.

Does winning a prize motivate you to ask your neighbourhood to stop smoking?

In 2008 the WHO called for a total ban on tobacco advertising. It said advertising was one of the biggest factors that made people take up smoking.

Think about a smoker who is close to you. Was it advertising or peer pressure that made the habit start? Is the gross truth about what tobacco does to lungs enough information to stop the habit?

The governments care for the people in their homelands, and care for the international relations. Do you believe governments let people smoke because of revenue gained by taxation? Is it more likely that the governments put a user fee (tax) on unhealthy habits as a negative encouragement to choose healthy habits?

In the west, tobacco companies can influence some politicians. However, in some countries, anti-corruption is high on the agenda, and so tobacco, alcohol, and weapons are strongly discouraged or banned. We had a phase in America of cleaning the people's habits and raising our societal standards, called the Prohibition in the 1920s. The phase worked, although there was underground resistance, the result is fewer ways for corruption to hide.

What would an economy without tobacco and alcohol look like? Less revenue through taxation, fewer health complications, so, less work for doctors and nurses. More people living into old age. Bad habits are expensive.

Maybe governments who care for the people's well-being can donate the tax revenue created by bad habits directly into anti-corruption efforts, improving police effectiveness and hiring more police.

In Canada, we recently legalized cannabis. The way it is happening is the legalized form is weak and the strong strains are pushed further underground than they used to be.

We have the infrastructure governments usually fund, so, tax revenue from bad habits need not fund what we already amply have. Instead, the causal factors fueling bad habits can be the target of next waves of anti-corruption around the world. I see this as part of globalization in a three-step iterative process:

1. anti-corrupt to claim new territory,

2. invest in socioeconomic development and sustainable infrastructure,

3. let environmental sustainability enrich the participating nations. For example, profit from forestation.

Reference

eslholidaylessons dot com has a calendar among its free lesson topics.