What's going on with the tobacco industry in Finland?

 

evasiljeva.ru

8 min

View Original

What's going on with the tobacco industry in Finland? I have been asking this question for a long time.

... We, who lived in the USSR, did not know at all what good tobacco is. When I remember all these cigarettes, I'm taken aback. Living in Murmansk, a port city, my friends and I ordered foreign cigarettes for long-distance sailors, such as Marlboro, Rothmans, Moreau, Kemel and others. The tobacco of these cigarettes was fragrant, pleasant. In Denmark, there were generally delicious cigarettes - Prince.

After Perestroika, such cigarettes poured into Russia, and we smokers were glad that now we can buy our favorite tobacco without overpayments. But our manufacturers began, as usual, to produce such cigarettes in Russia, and generously dilute it with low-grade shag.

It so happened that my relatives in Belarus, in Grodno, were friends with the director of a tobacco factory. And once, when I was visiting them, they gave me a tour of the tobacco factory. Oh, I don't even know if that's good or bad. But when the director of the factory took me around the shops and told me, I was horrified to learn that they reduce the strength of cigarettes by pouring saltpeter on tobacco abundantly: the more saltpeter, the less the strength of nicotine.

Imported good tobacco they buy, but it is relatively expensive. Therefore, it was generously diluted with Belarusian or Russian shmurdyak - tobacco. He's cheap. Such cigarettes became stronger, respectively, it was required to treat the whole mixture with saltpeter in general.

The bad habit of “bodying” good imported tobacco subsequently spread to all Russian manufacturers ...

... And, having arrived in Finland, I was sure that I would be able to buy branded cigarettes like before, freely. But it was not there.

Some smart heads decided to fight smoking, and in addition to the unpopular "dry law", they adopted a law on tobacco.

Prohibition once gave rise to wild corruption in Finland. The meaning of this action was that the sale of alcohol went under the control of the state. The price of alcoholic beverages has skyrocketed. The Finns explained this action by the fight against alcoholism. As a result, those who drank continued to drink, and, having cars, went to Russia for vodka, and for other strong drinks to the Baltic countries or to Sweden-Denmark, they bought boxes there, and drove the "green serpent" home. Demand gave birth to supply, smuggling flourished, in general, millions of marks, and then euros, began to go past the country's budget.

In the mid-90s, sober-minded deputies of Parliament tried to cancel this stupid law, but outweighed the opinion that if we let go of this industry from the hands of the state, then everyone will get drunk.

And since the delivery of alcoholic beverages due to the curb takes place on weekends, to this day, weekends in Finland are more like one big wedding. The Finns hang out loud and merrily during the week.

Although drunks in a extinguished state already exist, and go all day long and they do not care about the "dry law". These exist in all countries.

And it seemed that we should draw conclusions from this, but no. Some proactive non-smoking deputies decided to start controlling smokers in the same way, arguing that people would quit smoking because of the high prices for cigarettes.

But the opposite happened. The Forbidden fruit is sweet. And as soon as the prices of tobacco products soared, the Finns again rushed to stock up on cigarettes in neighboring countries.

And the number of smokers has increased. Moreover, which is dangerous, children start smoking from the age of 9-10.

Once again, as with alcohol, the government gave permission for the production and sale of cigarettes to "its" trusted people, creating a new round of corruption.

Well, how not to adopt the habits of Russia's neighbor? Fortunately, non-smokers in the Parliament or the government cannot check and evaluate the quality of tobacco ... In a word, Finnish manufacturers, following the example of Russian ones, began to body branded tobacco with low-grade Russian ones.

But back to my beloved. So, having come to Finland as an asylum seeker, without money, I faced, like everyone here, the problem of buying cigarettes.

At first I bought tobacco, paper and filters, rolled cigarettes myself. How vile is the quality of this tobacco - I immediately appreciated it. But I had a glimmer of hope that maybe other varieties with different names would have a better taste ... For five years I have tried all varieties of tobacco sold in Finland, as well as all varieties of commercially available cigarettes.

Imagine my surprise when it began to dawn on me that the tobacco, albeit with different names, was from the same bag! My favorite Camel and Marlboro are similar to the old Soviet Stewardess or Inter. And the elite tobacco sold in specialized stores at fabulous prices is the tobacco of ordinary American cigarettes! This is where corruption flourishes.

And then in the very first months, smokers shared with me how and where you can buy normal (not Finnish) cheap cigarettes. Oh, this is a whole quest for smokers. And I have never seen a more united mass of people in Finland.

The fact that millions of euros float away daily past the Finnish treasury is visible to the naked eye.

The false notion that if something is banned, people will stop using it has been confirmed again.

It's like with sex and children's curiosity: where do children come from. Once it is correct to extinguish the child's interest in this issue, and that's it.

You can't ban alcohol, cigarettes - you need to explain their harm from childhood, and not focus people's attention on this. But judging by the way in the doorways, around the corners of schools during breaks, children smoke cigarettes - this experiment with the ban has done great harm to the country.

There is another dangerous trend in society, which originated in the depths of the fight against smokers. Let me give you an analogy - the Jews. Or rather, the persecution of the Jews. We all understand that this is racism. But the persecution of people who smoke: smoking bans in the building, in restaurants. Refusal to hire people who smoke - what is it if not discrimination and infringement of civil rights? I wrote about this separately in the article ... By the way, if you look closely, you can see that almost all the inventions and benefits of civilization were created by people who smoke. They are leading among the long-livers, by the way.

And when, in 2020, the Russian tobacco king suddenly bought a huge plot of land, bypassing the permission of the Finnish Ministry of Defense, my guesses about the developed oligarchic corruption in Finland were only confirmed.

Moreover, Russian corrupt officials bought up not just tidbits of land, but those located in the immediate vicinity of the Baltic Sea, the Aland Islands, in fact, pushing Finland away from the sea.

And the aggression unleashed by Russia against Ukraine and the entire civilized world has become a real security threat for Finland itself: you never know what is now stored in the private territories of houses, private buildings owned by these rich Russians. And someone in the Finnish government is clearly covering for them, tied up with joint business, dark trading schemes and unaccounted for joint money.

After all, warehouses with Russian weapons were discovered quite by accident in the Alans - in the demilitarized zone. And well done security police officers, although the Ministry of Defense of Finland should have taken care of this.

This is how we moved from the poor quality of cigarettes to big politics and the security of little Finland.

A striking example of uncontrolled corruption and alcohol smuggling is the fact that since 2014 Finnish vodka bottled in the center of Helsinki has been found on store shelves in the so-called DPR and LPR, in the occupied territories of Ukraine. That is, someone from the government circles in Finland is not just making money, but in fact, is financing Russian terrorists.

Well, I'm just silent about the fact that in Finland there is a massive deception of consumers in the sale of cigarettes from low-grade tobacco.

And again, instead of stopping the development of this corruption, we see that the prices of tobacco products climbed up. The question arises: who oversees this industry? Who is profiting from the diluted tobacco?

Here it is worth mentioning another important issue: the inscriptions on cigarette packs with the words "heart attack", "cancer", "impotence".

At one time, I worked very closely with doctors of various specialties, including pathologists. And when they first began to print scary pictures with terrible inscriptions on packs, it was the pathologists who were the first to laugh out loud. Yes, people have a wide variety of advanced diseases.

But according to statistics, up to 80% of non-smokers die from heart attacks and cardiovascular diseases. The same statistics are among patients with cancer and all types of necrosis. The proportion of smokers among those who fell ill with such diseases is so small that there is nothing to talk about.

The fact that people develop such diseases is to blame for modern medicine, a century-old method of serving patients in all countries of the world. But this is a topic for another serious discussion.

In the meantime, in the face of the impending threat of the eastern neighbor - Russia, it is time for the Finnish intelligence services to conduct a thorough check among government circles, officials and businessmen in charge of the tobacco and alcohol industries. I think a lot of ugly stories will come out.

And the Ministry of Education should introduce lessons in schools in which children need to explain the negative side effects on the growing body as a result of the use of alcoholic beverages and tobacco, since the only thing that is reliably established is that they delay puberty, slow growth and impair brain development during adolescence. This is quite enough for teenagers. Well, in advanced age, people themselves will be able to make their own choices regarding these habits.

Просмотры: