Had Samuel Langhorne Clemens been born in New Zealand any time now, he might have never turned Mark Twain. Last week, the country brought in a ban that will not allow any person born after 2008 to buy cigarettes or tobacco products, which basically means that all those less than 12 years of age in New Zealand will not be legally permitted to purchase cigarettes. “We want to make sure young people never start smoking,” said the health minister of New Zealand Ayesha Verall. Twain began smoking “immoderately” when he was eight years old. In one of his essays he writes, “I began with one hundred cigars a month, and by the time I was twenty I had increased my allowance to two hundred a month. Before I was thirty, I had increased it to three hundred a month.”

Sin Tax and More

To discourage smoking, New Zealand has imposed a series of sin tax hikes in recent times. Today, a pack of cigarettes costs around $22.50 in New Zealand, which is roughly Rs 1,700. The increase in price has made cigarettes difficult to afford and some cite this as the reason behind the reported incidence of tobacco-related robberies. Things were different when Twain was a boy in mid-19th century America. In his autobiography, Twain writes of his home state: “… out yonder in Missouri, the ordinary cigar cost thirty cents a hundred, but most people did not try to afford them, since smoking a pipe cost nothing in that tobacco- growing country.”

Tom Yum

If New Zealand is at one end of the smoking spectrum, China is at the other end. Not quite Missouri of the early 19th century, but close enough. A pack of cigarettes costs $3.14 in China. This might convert to about Rs 230, but experts remind us of the “unprecedented income growth” in China and how it has “outpaced the increase in cigarette prices” making them highly affordable. China also happens to be the world's largest producer and consumer of tobacco — 44 per cent of the world’s cigarettes are smoked in China. According to a paper in The Lancet titled “Increasing tobacco sales under the anti-smoking policy in China”, the country's tobacco industry has boycotted warning images on the pack that are pretty much the norm world over. And it seems, teenagers there can buy cigarettes at any retailer or online without showing identity cards. Twain and other “penniless boys” of his age got their supply from a melancholy hunchback shopkeeper in the village. He writes, "…we could always get a supply of cigars by fetching a bucket of water for him from the village pump, whether he needed water or not.” It is safe to assume that if the spirit of Twain were still hovering for a new incarnation, it would know exactly which country to pick.