No-Sin-Tax Nation

A friend of mine recently came back from a short holiday in Singapore. He said it cost him $12 for a glass of draft beer. He’s not the type to frequent luxury digs so I assume that price is not unusual. It was six dollars when I was there twenty years ago. Why is going out on the town, drinking a few beers and having some fun reserved only for the well-heeled? Why is that most common of pastimes made off-limits to Average Joe.

An Aussie friend said a bottle of Stoly vodka, which costs seven bucks here goes for forty there. Bailey’s is twelve dollars here, seventy five there. Beer is equally outrageously priced there though I don’t remember the numbers. The only break you get is on wine which Australia produces a lot of. That seems totally unfair to me. Why should a product which would ordinarily be within reach of nearly everybody be priced so only the upper classes can afford it? Personally, I much prefer beer, but sometimes I like a little taste of spirits or liquors so I would resent being excluded from that simple pleasure.

We know why developed country governments love sin taxes, they always need money and there aren’t many people to object since they can claim they’re doing people a favor by forcing them to cut back on things that aren’t good for them. However, moderate drinking is not a health problem, in fact, studies have shown that two-beers-a day imbibers live longer than non-drinkers. A few beers after dinner can help a person relax after a stressful day, relieve the pressure, take the hard edge off of sometimes difficult life circumstances. Why should that relief be reserved for the wealthy? The additional stress from not having access to drink may be worse for a person’s health than the alcohol itself. In moderation, of course.

In Cambodia there are no rules about who can enter a bar, if you want to bring your two-year-old kid with you, you can. Is there something inherently evil about people drinking, joking, having a good time that a child shouldn’t see? Okay, I can understand why you wouldn’t want to bring a little kid to a strip joint, but to a place where friends gather could never be a problem. After all, they see the same friends drinking together at parties in their homes.

Yet in America it’s a terrible transgression to allow a 20-year-old to see the nefarious act of people drinking together. In Western society drinking is a widely advertised, commonplace activity. All that’s accomplished by arbitrarily restricting access is to reinforce the forbidden fruit syndrome. The more you’re told you can’t have it because it’s not good for you while ‘adults’ – those over 21 – are doing it all around you, the more you want it, and when you do manage to obtain it, the more you tend to binge and overdo it. Mostly I’m speaking of America, European attitudes are far more reasonable and relaxed.

There’s no minimum age for purchasing alcoholic beverages here, if you want to send your kid down to the local store to buy beer for you, you can. In most American states there are restrictions on who can sell alcohol and where. In Oregon, for instance, beer and wine can be sold at markets, but only with a special permit. Spirits, however, are only sold at state franchised liquor stores. Oregon even makes a distinction between taverns which can only sell beer and wine and bars which can sell everything. All that trouble to try to influence people’s behavior, but does it work?

Well, for sure, the average Singaporean isn’t going to go out to a bar for a few beers if it costs a day’s wages, but they may buy their beer in a market and drink at home, though it still costs a lot in relative terms. And that’s one point I’m making: many people will sacrifice to obtain those beers. It isn’t necessarily an addiction, but if it makes you feel good and helps you get through the day, you’ll give up a lot to have those few brews. Beer and wine are still reasonably priced in most parts of America, so people there aren’t deprived of that age-old pastime.

In addition to all types of commercial alcoholic beverages being cheap and easily available here, locals also have access to very low cost local drinks. Homemade non-commercially packaged palm wine is very potent – 40 or 50% alcohol – and very cheap. About 8 years ago a bar girl I knew brought back to the bar a 330ml coke can which had been refilled with palm wine that cost 500 riels or 12 cents. Today I think it costs double that; still a small amount of money to get pretty loaded.

So the question is, Do Khmers drink more because it’s so accessible? Does alcohol cause excessive disruption to social life because it’s so cheap? How does the impact of alcohol on Cambodian life compare to same on American life? Well, there certainly are plentiful stories of drunken Khmers causing altercations and disruptions but as far as I can tell, no more than the states. The only caveat is that many problems related to alcohol that do arise here stem from things like uneducated peasantry getting out of line or lax enforcement of drunk driving laws and just in general because of being a poor developing country and nothing to do with easy access.

Cheap alcohol is an aid to tourism since it allows many restaurants and bars to charge as little as a dollar for a local beer and even less in happy hour. Alcohol has its downsides, as all we drinkers know, but it’s only education that can make a difference there, besides as adults we ought to be able to make our own decisions in that matter.

Tobacco taxes are also very low or nonexistent here. Better quality locally produced cigs cost an average of 50 cents, imported brands a dollar, the down-and-dirty rough-cut local brands cost as little as ten cents. In the markets you can buy tobacco in bulk for a price that’s practically negligible. Compared to most American states where cigarettes go for upwards of $5 a pack, Australia, $14, some Scandinavian countries as much as $20, you can smoke as much as you want here without ever having to consider the cost.

Tobacco isn’t the same as alcohol because, contrary to alcohol which, in spite of its many and obvious drawbacks, has redeeming qualities, tobacco has none. That is a personal feeling backed up by 28 years hooked on tobacco. There are smokers who say they feel relaxed and derive pleasure from smoking. I scoff, but who am I to question their feelings? Nonetheless, almost everybody agrees that it’s a nasty habit, and that includes the vast majority of smokers, who wish they could quit.

Kissing a smoker reminds me of ashtrays, the smoke is not only foul smelling but causes cancer in non-smokers who are exposed to it – 3000 Americans a year die from diseases caused by second-hand smoke; they are mostly people who work in bars, the last place in America where tobacco smoke is still somewhat tolerated. There’s something about tobacco that’s intrinsically carcinogenic. You can get cancer just as easily from chewing it as smoking it. I also read recently that the way it is commercially grown; that is, doused with loads of poisonous chemicals – pesticides and herbicides - increases its carcinogenic properties.

Thus, in some ways, tobacco sin taxes are justified because the nasty shit really is bad for you, but those taxes are still discriminatory since they only impact the lower classes. Besides tobacco is addictive, as a result many people literally can’t stop regardless of the drain on their budget. I know people who say it’s easier to kick heroin then nicotine. One thing that facilitates that addiction is that nicotine is added to cigs to help get you hooked and used to a high dose.

I started at 12. My first drag came from a giant novelty cigar. It was the size of a foot long sausage. Okay, that was almost 60 years ago so I don’t want to exaggerate, but anyway it was far bigger than a typical cigar. Needless to say I didn’t get very far. I quickly started coughing, felt dizzy and turned ashen white. It didn’t take long after that though before I was smoking a pack a day of non-filter cigarettes - when I could rustle up the 25 cents they cost.

I had coughing fits as early as 15. I’d be vegging out sitting in front of the boob tube smoking one after another and just be hacking my brains out. I actually quit for a year during teen times. Not long after I started back up I was out playing soccer in gym class. I’d played before quite easily and I loved the sport but after smoking I was so out of breath I realized I was either going to play sports or smoke cigs but not both. Since I knew how hard it would be for me to quit smoking at that point I said goodbye to sports.

In the fifties nearly 70% of Americans smoked. Tobacco advertising was everywhere. The Camel TV ad claimed that 9 out of 10 doctors preferred their brand. Edward R. Murrow always had a lit cigarette going during his newscasts. Smoking made you feel big and grown up. Several times I’ve heard people suggest that people back then didn’t understand how bad they were, but we teens referred to cigarettes as coffin nails so we knew exactly what we were getting into.

I finally quit at 40 using the total immersion or overdoing it method. A lot of the years I smoked it was cheap, harsh roll-your-owns and I had reached a point where I was coughing nearly all the time. I sounded so bad my friends were afraid for me. I had quit several times early on but always gone back, but in the last half of my time smoking the only occasions when I didn’t smoke was when I was so sick I couldn’t possibly take another drag. As a result of that understanding I purposely made myself sick by immersing myself in it. I starting smoking one after another of cheap roll-your-own tobacco. When I ran out of fresh tobacco, I started rolling up buts, all the while coughing my brains out. I even got to the point of rolling up buts of buts before I was so ill the thought of taking another puff became inconceivable. It took several days to recover. I haven’t taken a single hit since then except when I’ve been tricked into it by dragging on a European style joint. Every time I do, at least partly because I take it in deeply not realizing it has tobacco in it, I’m full on into a coughing fit.

I tolerate tobacco smoke in bars and restaurants, though I despise it like most ex-smokers, because this is Cambodia where we don’t make a fuss about those things. For sure there’s no smoking here in buses and schools, etc., but otherwise it’s your life and everybody’s entitled to their own poison. I did it to lots of others over the years, so I can hardly complain. Anyway a little second-hand tobacco smoke here and there isn’t going to kill me.

I know people who don’t smoke when they are back in the West because it costs so much, but get right into when they come here, so high taxes do have a point. But if a person can take it or leave it based on cost then they probably aren’t the type to be uncontrollably addicted and they probably won’t smoke long enough or consistently enough to develop a disease.

To me one of the worst aspects of smoking is the slavenly hold the evil tobacco companies have over you. They’ve got you by the short hairs and you can’t do a damn thing about it. You keep feeding their overflowing coffers though you hate yourself for doing it.

In my opinion if you really want to smoke you should smoke clean unadulterated tobacco and roll you own. You may feel kindly towards nicotine, but you sure don’t need to inhale all the other toxic chemicals that commercial tobacco is laced with. If you are rolling your own, you can’t smoke as many or as often, because you have to sit down for a minute or two to roll one up. Commercial cigarettes, with the ease of popping one in your mouth and the extra nicotine they are fortified with will also cause you to smoke a lot more than you would with clean roll-your-own tobacco. The tobacco that you can buy in bulk at local markets here was probably grown with agricultural chemicals but I doubt extremely much if any other chemicals were added to it. If you smoke a small or moderate amount of clean tobacco, you probably won’t get cancer, at least your chances are far diminished.

Meanwhile it’s a pleasure to be in a place where you can make your own choices and aren’t discriminated against because you don’t have a lot of money. They’ll probably get around to sin taxes eventually, but for now you’re home free here to indulge to your heart’s content.