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Cigarettes And Long Term Health Effects

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Cigarettes Kill. "Tobacco accounted for over 4.023 million deaths in 1998"1. There is a relation between cigarettes and long term health effects or smoking related illnesses. The case in India had the government engaged in a dialogue and democratic debate on if they wanted to create an advertising ban on cigarettes. They wanted to prevent undue influence on their youth to take up smoking and in so doing save their lives or possible future health care expenditures.

To help support their position for doing so they studied the effects that bans on advertising smoking had on other countries. According to the research there was a direct decline in the rates of smoking for those countries in which there was a complete ban, and marginal decline in those with incomplete bans.

There was also precedent set amongst other consumer products. The advertising of firearms and pharmaceuticals were also regulated by the government. This ban on advertising was not a ban on the sale of the products but only on their marketing.

To assuage concerns on if the loss of cigarette sales would adversely effect the economy they also pointed to another study that showed that if a policy was made to reduce smoking, the funds would that would otherwise be used for smoking would still be injected into the economy but to other goods and services. The research pointed to these other purchases to be towards ones that are more labour intensive and thus would produce more jobs.

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