Licence to Smoke: Is it a Smart Card?
Monday 5 August 2013 @ 9.30 a.m. | Legal Research
Various newspapers are reporting that smokers in Australia could be required to carry a ''smart-card licence'' to purchase cigarettes in the future. Health authorities, it is claimed, justify this by saying they can then track the behaviour of smokers and then better target quit messages to them as well as control sale of smoking products to minors.
In an article published in the Medical Journal of Australia called Could a scheme for licensing smokers work in Australia? the University of Sydney Law School's Professor Roger Magnusson and chief executive of the Cancer Institute NSW Professor David Currow raised the possibilty of such an scheme. They also raise the point that such a licence scheme could make it harder for children and adolescents to buy cigarettes.
The proposal follows on a similar idea raised by anti-smoking crusader Professor Simon Chapman in 2012. Essentially the measure would require adult smokers to be forced to purchase a licence to buy cigarettes. The licence on a smart card would be encoded with age and identity-verifying information. Retailers of cigarettsd would then be required to reconcile all stock purchased from wholesalers against a digital record of their retail sales to licensed smokers. This process would assist in creating a database of registered smokers and their cigarette purchasing habbits as well as creating an incentive for retailers to comply with laws that prohibit tobacco sales to children. This smart card is argued to be a simpler system than the one proposed by Professor Chapman that would ... "enable health authorities to detect patterns and variations in smokers' behaviour and to develop more sophisticated, individualised communications to assist smokers to quit ... [and] ... will enable rigorous evaluation of smoking cessation programs, ensuring that public health dollars are focused on evidence-based strategies that yield the best returns.''
The proposal like the measures for "plain packaging" of cigarret packaging targets smoking through a measure which again acts to restrict the civil liberties of a specific group by reducing their rights to have access to, use of, or the ability to purchase, a still legal, albiet a dangerous product and one that it is agreed costs the community a great deal in health costs and other remedial action. There may be no need to fear smoking measures of this kind for the good they may do in a particular area of the community like reducing smoking illness but there may be some cause to worry that a body of precedent is being built up which might be misused or put to less worthy causes in future.
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