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.
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.