Tin packs and ten packs

From tomorrow you could face two years in prison if you sell a branded pack of cigarettes. What a great country we live in.

It will also be illegal to sell cigarettes in packs of ten, which leads me to this from The Guardian...

The maker of Marlboro cigarettes has been accused of trying to sidestep new UK laws on plain packaging by rolling out durable tins that look just like ordinary cigarette packets.

Either you break the law or you don't. 'Sidestep' here means 'comply with' - and good for them. I haven't seen any of these tins and, according to the Guardian, Philip Morris have 'distributed a relatively small number' of them, but I wish all the cigarette companies had done the same thing to make a mockery of this absurd law. If you can't geld hold of one, there are plenty of stylish cigarette cases to buy at the click of a button.

It's a tiny gesture of defiance from Philip Morris as their intellectual property is snuffed out, but it has enraged the usual headbangers. Labour MP Alex Cunningham says: 'It’s against the whole spirit of what’s intended with the plain packaging legislation', but since the intention of the legislation is to annoy the tobacco industry - it will do nowt else - it seems wholly in the spirit of this childish spat for the tobacco industry to annoy the anti-smoking lobby.

More weirdly, some cretin from Bath University's Tobacco Research Group is furious that the tins only hold room for 10 cigarettes:

“Research shows that packs of 10 appeal to young people and the price conscious,” said Karen Reeves-Evans, of the Tobacco Research Group at the University of Bath. “By offering packs of 10 in reusable tins, Philip Morris International is knowingly increasing the lifespan of packs of 10 and promoting its brand, if smokers decant their cigarettes into these small branded tins."

You what?!

Even if you ignore the counter-productive idiocy of banning 10-packs, which smokers use as a self-constraint mechanism to reduce their consumption, and focus instead on the mutton-headed justification for the ban, ie. that the chiiiiiiildren are more likely to start smoking if they can buy ten cigarettes for a mere, er, £5, your objective has been achieved by forcing people to buy packs of 20. If smokers want to then decant half of the cigarettes into a tin it is of no consequence to 'young people', 'the price conscious' or anyone else.

These people are catatonically stupid.