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.
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
I don’t need a cigarette to get to work or the grocery store.
Congratulations on discovering false equivalency.
Neither do you need a car in a well planned city.
Cool, I don’t live in a well planned city and I would have to immigrate out of the country to do so, or wait likely decades for reforms to make their way here. In the mean time, I’ll still need a car. I don’t need to smoke a cig in public.
Nah mate. Just rip up the streets and relay them yourself, it’s so simple smh.
I would need to drive to move to a different city. Checkmate.
Shame living in a city absolutely sucks.
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To people completely lacking social skills and with below average intelligence, maybe.
Or to anyone who can’t focus when there’s a shitload of background noise, or anyone who doesn’t want to have to share a one-bedroom apartment with 3 other people just to be able to afford rent, or anyone who has difficulty in large crowds…
I’ve lived in a city before and I fucking hated it.
Europe is working on it. They will ban the sale of new gas powered vehicles by 2035
When this was announced, my opinion was that only hobbyists would even be interested in gas powered cars by 2035. I have to admit I thought the transition to electric vehicles would pick up pace a little quicker more suddenly than it has so far, but there’s still time to have my prediction come true.
… and CARB states in the US
Weren’t they by 2032 earlier and 2030 before that?
Bruh keep it in your fuck cars community. The rest of the world has bigger shit to deal with.
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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Yep, all the while alcoholism is at all time highs, so much so that they had to rebrand it as social drinking. Alcohol, still allowed to advertise every where, and can sell fruit flavors, but tobacco…nope. Tobacco should be left alone at this point. The majority of people don’t smoke, like like 7% in the USA, this includes all tobacco users. Prohibition just creates blackmarkets and death.
Tell that to the vape industry. Nothing more disgusting than walking through a cloud of shit that smells like cotton candy.
Yeah, a kid was just kicked off my sons siccer team for vaping in school - someone failed somewhere that he was able to develop a habit
He’s not vaping as a habit, dude is just trying to look cool. A ton of those kids vape 0mg juices, because they can’t handle the amount of nicotine you can get from vaping.
I’m sure he looked cool getting caught alone in the school bathroom vamping, and being kicked off the team. Which do you think is the coolest, being ostracized or kicked off the team? Maybe walking home by himself because his former buddies on the team think he’s a dumbass?
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Well, the soccer kids. I imagine he had others, but who knows if he succeeded in switching cliques
Are…are you like 12? What a weird ass anecdotal story was that???
Actually alcohol advertising is pretty limited in Europe due to EU wide regulations and some countries have even stricter rules, ranging from “not in public spaces” to straight up “no alcohol advertising at all”
Also I would point out alcohol is a big cusine thing and has been for centuries and you’re nuts if you’re upset schnapps are a thing but not strawberry cigarettes. Also like, flavoured vapes totally exist?
It used to be restricted in Sweden. Now of days, commercials on TV are 50% for online casinos, and 50% for alcohol. On billboards, they just write “non-alcoholic” text, yet the exact same bottles are primarily sold with alcohol.
I don’t think either should be regulated like it is, but the idea with tobacco was that kids are drawn to it but somehow not alcohol with their fruity flavors. It’s a bullshit double standard. And flavored cigars are what they went after…no kid is smoking an $8 acid cigar.
Same thing: tax the hell out of both. Vice taxes are too low. It may not help current users but it should help over time by discouraging new users.
I do drink alcohol sometimes, so yes I’m advocating more pain on myself. It won’t effect me since as an occasional drinker, it just won’t add up, but lets try anyway. I have kids who will need to make such decisions
Vice taxes are insane already. You sound like you have no clue how much taxes is pulled already from tobacco and alcohol taxes.
What should be taxed to hell is fast food and sugary shit. Obesity is our number one killer now and has been for a while.
Ok. Sure, junk food is horrible for people’s health, not least because it can seem like the cheapest way to eat. If it no longer being cheap encourages people to make healthier choices, I’m all for it. As someone who would pay more in multiple of these categories, I’m still all for it
Fuck that. Vice taxes are taxes on poor people. Make healthcare actually affordable and maybe people could get help with their addictions instead of getting punished by the government.
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.
Harmful to others habbit.
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.
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.
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Never heard of that before, I will do a little reading. Always nice to learn new things.
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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Yeah…I was addicted to pot and smoked daily for 12 years and I beg to differ.
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I agree. The control freaks have had their way many times before and it never turns out well for anyone outside of the 1%. This is a great litmus test for finding them. There are many more sensible regulations that could be employed still to preserve users’ health while also making their habit less disruptive to others, and little-to-no evidence that prohibition would be better than any of them. Which makes me think prohibitionists are most likely ill-informed or are acting under ulterior motivations (traditionally hierarchical religious beliefs have often motivated prohibitions).
I think the bans in restaurants and cafes have been very successful, personally. I’d also like to see legislation on ingredients and other further action. As well as support programs. These are the things that materially help people, not prohibition and black markets.
Luckily, despite France’s many poor decisions in recent history, so far as I am aware they are courting regulation seriously and not prohibition, and these authoritarian comments we see in the Anglosphere have no weight on the domestic conversation in France.
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)
And there are more effective ways to deal with that burden than prohibition, is my thesis. Looking at the actual science, prohibition would rip away the method that many depressed and anxious people are using to self-medicate and would leave them no replacement for it. That would have tremendous public health ramifications. That would cause real suffering to people who are often already victims.
Do you deny that there are prohibitionists? If so, then this very thread proves you wrong. If not, then you do agree with me. Maybe this attack on my character wasn’t the best approach for your argument?
I don’t think that is quite so obvious. In recent threads on the topic of smoking, I have seen many people adding that they would like to see bans on cannabis smoking and that there other methods of consumption available. Many of these people pointed to edibles, which I consider dangerously ill-informed, because THC is processed differently and has different effects when eaten (it acts on traditional psychedelic pathways). Additionally, even in US states where it is “legalized,” there are many jurisdictions where it is still illegal to provide or consume - that’s not what a near unanimous consensus looks like.
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.
Just one? I don’t keep them on deck, but that’s easy enough. Here you go:
Prohibition causes problems when there aren’t substitutions, but there are less dangerous ways to consume nicotine and less deadly things to smoke.
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.
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
You’re advocating for a habit that has no benefit to society because “look what happened before!” It should be banned for sale. Full stop.
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Yeah but beer tastes nice. Burning tar does not.
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personally, i find the taste of ciggies to be much much better than the taste of coffee
Have you tried them both at the same time? You need good coffee, obviously.
Pipe tobacco is one of the best smelling things ever.
You think those 3 things are equal?
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What was that point?
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I am not a regular coffee drinker, but I bet there are MANY people who think coffee/caffeine provides a benefit to society.
Granted, that may only be because people got addicted in the first place. But I figure there’s a reason coffee is often free in an office.
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Nobody mentioned addiction, which is irrelevant since smoking only has disadvantages. You created a strawman argument then you doubted the proven benefits of coffee and red wine, which is even part of the mediterranean diet. You argue in bad faith and you are also uneducated, make us all a favour and leave.
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I also like to keep my caffeine drinks less disruptive to the organism. Am I right, fellow earth-born humans?
Citation needed. Coffee is understood to be generally good for you.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5696634/
ciggarettes were recommended by doctors for years too