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.
What the FUCK is a French man supposed to do after sex now?
more sex
that’s “more of zee sex” to you buddy
Oh, hon hon, oui monsieur.
Mentelgen
Always the answer
You ever eat a crêpe after a good ménage?
Suck another cock?
You act like wine and a baguette isn’t already at their bedside
Except the baguette is all wet now, I don’t want to eat it
That is just frosting
Smoke a baguette maybe?
Crème the brûlée?
Roll a doob.
Hit a fat cloud on his vape
Close the grave again.
Carbs.
Wait, my vision of a man wearing a striped shirt and a beret smoking a cigarette is not actually what French people are like?
Not anymore. It’s all changing for the worse. I hear they’re coming after the baguettes next. The mimes are speechless.
Sacré bleu!
No accent on the e
Maybe that is the mime speaking for the first time since childhood.
It is either sacrebleu or sacré bleu, but both are correct
I can’t find any source of the spelling or meaning of the phrase that does not have an accent over the e other than Wikipedia, which has both depending on who made the edit. You sure 'bout that?
It was originally Sacré dieu(sacred god), but since it’s blasphemy it became Sacrebleu. Sacrebleu on Wikitionary
I’m Quebecois, French is my first language ;)
Well steal my onions and call me Jacques!
No no that’s still accurate, it’s just that the cigarettes are imported now.
How can they truly be French and not smoke Gauloises I ask you?
Your link is broken, here’s the correct one : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gauloises_001.jpg
You see?
You see?
Uh… what?
Your link is working as well as mine. At least on kbin.
Jokes aside, I swear they really do walk around with baguettes in hand. 3 days in Paris, sitting at multiple cafes, and we saw it in the morning, at lunch, in the evening. Men, Women, Children, well dressed, poorly dressed (for a Parisian), black, white, brown, blue, green, every combination in between, we’d see someone walking around with baguettes. I’ve lived in multiple cities and visited even more in the US and Europe. Never have I seen so many people walking around with bread!
People eat bread and pick it up from their local bakery then walk home with it instead of stuffing it in the trunk of their SUV to drive two blocks. What do you expect.
You’re right of course, nor was I making any judgements. I loved seeing it! It made me smile. As did the quintessential “scowling french waiter” standing 15ft in front of us on the other side of the side walk, with apron and and all. And despite a previous poster’s comment about their infamous cultural rudeness, these slightly overweight, non-french speaking Americans didn’t experience any overt rudeness at all. If they were bad mouthing us quietly in french they did a great job of hiding it. [shrug]
I would visit Paris again in a heartbeat; though I would never fly Air France nor pass through CDG if you paid me. Such a horrible experience. Guess we’ll fly BA into LHR and take the chunnel or a ferry for the experience.
That’s because fresh baguettes are damn hard to beat.
And hard to eat if they aren’t fresh anymore.
They also live up their their infamous cultural rudeness.
The bagetttes make my poor mouth sore after a couple of days as well. I much prefer the breads in northern Europe.
[shrug] we really didn’t experience the rudeness they are so famous for. But I’m not denying it’s a thing. Either way, I enjoy both styles of bread very much.
Yes monsieur.
Well you still have 50% of the adult population regularly smoking so nothing change on this part.
“Heuh heuh”
background bistro accordion music gets louder
When I went to Paris this summer, lots of locals were smoking. The odor of Paris was urine and cigarettes.
Nothing speaks “city of love” like the smell of stale piss and burnt tobacco at the Eiffel Tower!
lol
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.
While I support bans in restaurants and cafes, I don’t support prohibition, which is what a lot of Western nations are aiming at. We learned our lesson during the alcohol prohibition years in America, and for the last 70 years around the world with marijuana prohibition. The social effects are far worse when forcing recreational drugs underground. Educate support addiction programs, but don’t ban.
Ban use in public in general. I don’t want to be forced to walk through a cloud of cigarette smoke in front of a train station or waiting at a traffic light any more than in a restaurant. People can do what they want at home but constantly having to deal with drug addicts polluting the air around me shouldn’t be accepted.
Now do cars
Europe is working on it. They will ban the sale of new gas powered vehicles by 2035
When this was announced, my opinion was that only hobbyists would even be interested in gas powered cars by 2035. I have to admit I thought the transition to electric vehicles would pick up pace a little quicker more suddenly than it has so far, but there’s still time to have my prediction come true.
Weren’t they by 2032 earlier and 2030 before that?
… and CARB states in the US
Bruh keep it in your fuck cars community. The rest of the world has bigger shit to deal with.
We learned our lesson during the alcohol prohibition years in America.
We’re not America and we’re not banning alcohol, nor are we banning the drug in tobacco that people smoke it for.
So it is an entirely different scenario to either American prohibition or to cannabis.
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i will be a cigarette smuggler in this modern age
Practice not being startled.
It’s weird there’s such a push to ban cigarettes while smoking marijuana is becoming more acceptable.
People simply smoke a lot more cigs than pot per day. If you smoked 10-20 joints a day for many years your lungs and body would be wrecked too.
That amount would quite possibly make you unable to continue using weed via Cannabis hyperemesis syndrome. Killed at least two folks too.
You have an article to link to that, that is peer reviewed by a medical board and scientists that this claim is real?
https://www.cmaj.ca/content/194/46/E1576#:~:text=Andrews’%20study%20was%20the%20first,at%20least%20one%20CHS%20attack.
It’s a real disorder, but we’re just recently getting to the point where it’s even legal to study cannabis use so data is sparse. What we do know is that there’s a subset of heavy users that develop a persistent vomiting disorder and cessation of cannabinoids clears it up. My brother in law’s brother has it and he has to be careful with some chemicals in foods that mimic cannabinoids even.
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Never heard of that before, I will do a little reading. Always nice to learn new things.
I don’t find it weird at all. Cannabis is less harmful, less addictive, and subjectively, I find it way more fun.
Tobacco (nicotine) is hyper addictive to the point where people gradually get chemically compelled to smoke just about all the time. Arguably maybe caffeine is similarly compelling (I certainly drink caffeine all day), but most people consider caffeine to be pretty benign. Cigarettes are one of the hardest soft drugs to quit.
The long-term health effects of cannabis probably need to be studied more, but prohibition has actually made it harder to do just that. Now that the laws around weed have relaxed a little bit, it’ll be much easier for people to legitimately do the scientific studies needed to show how cannabis affects the human body, how it affects the mind and mood, how additive it is compared to other common drugs, how it is typically used, and what effects legalization has on society compared to decades of criminalization.
The thing that I find truly weird, and actually pretty upsetting, is that I can stop by one of the many dispensaries around here and pick up weed flower or a 10-pack of cannabis gummies for like 15 bucks, but in other parts of the country there are people sitting in jail for less.
I mean breathing in smoke seems is bad for you no matter what.
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The main difference between cannabis and tobacco is that one is addictive and encourages you to engage in the habit ten or twenty times a day.
Setting plants on fire and inhaling the smoke causes cancer. Doesn’t matter much which plant, though there’s surely some that are worse than these two. Neither one is good for you.
Of course, cannabis is often consumed in other forms (edibles, vaping, etc.).
But it’s the ROA with these two plants that cause the most problems. And outside of frequency of use they’re both carcenoginic.
Yeah…I was addicted to pot and smoked daily for 12 years and I beg to differ.
Beg to differ on what part? Addiction?
Yes, cannabis can be habit forming. But as someone who has used both extensively tobacco addiction doesn’t compare to a cannabis habit. One encourages you to light up ten or twenty times a day and smoke a whole cigarette each time, from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed.
I don’t think I’ve smoked ten bowls in a single day in 30 years of blazing.
If you want to argue as to rather or not the burnt carbon in cannabis is carcinogenic I’d have to dig out some research.
I agree. The control freaks have had their way many times before and it never turns out well for anyone outside of the 1%. This is a great litmus test for finding them. There are many more sensible regulations that could be employed still to preserve users’ health while also making their habit less disruptive to others, and little-to-no evidence that prohibition would be better than any of them. Which makes me think prohibitionists are most likely ill-informed or are acting under ulterior motivations (traditionally hierarchical religious beliefs have often motivated prohibitions).
I think the bans in restaurants and cafes have been very successful, personally. I’d also like to see legislation on ingredients and other further action. As well as support programs. These are the things that materially help people, not prohibition and black markets.
Luckily, despite France’s many poor decisions in recent history, so far as I am aware they are courting regulation seriously and not prohibition, and these authoritarian comments we see in the Anglosphere have no weight on the domestic conversation in France.
Those “control freaks” only exist in your imagination, look at the reality around you. Almost everyone’s up for legalization of cannabis.
Tobacco users however are a huge burden on national health programs (ok except on the US, where people are just expected to cough up all their family’s money before they die idk)
And there are more effective ways to deal with that burden than prohibition, is my thesis. Looking at the actual science, prohibition would rip away the method that many depressed and anxious people are using to self-medicate and would leave them no replacement for it. That would have tremendous public health ramifications. That would cause real suffering to people who are often already victims.
Those “control freaks” only exist in your imagination
Do you deny that there are prohibitionists? If so, then this very thread proves you wrong. If not, then you do agree with me. Maybe this attack on my character wasn’t the best approach for your argument?
Almost everyone’s up for legalization of cannabis.
I don’t think that is quite so obvious. In recent threads on the topic of smoking, I have seen many people adding that they would like to see bans on cannabis smoking and that there other methods of consumption available. Many of these people pointed to edibles, which I consider dangerously ill-informed, because THC is processed differently and has different effects when eaten (it acts on traditional psychedelic pathways). Additionally, even in US states where it is “legalized,” there are many jurisdictions where it is still illegal to provide or consume - that’s not what a near unanimous consensus looks like.
Prohibition causes problems when there aren’t substitutions, but there are less dangerous ways to consume nicotine and less deadly things to smoke.
You drinking alcohol doesn’t affect my health. You smoking cigarettes does - even in your own 4 walls, unless you have a few hundred meters distance from every neighbor. So I do support the idea of completely forbidding smoking - but I concede it’s not very practical and can’t really be done. Forbidding it in public spaces and restaurants / bars however, and whereever smoke will be blown to people who don’t like it? Yes, at least the legislation to enforce that would be very welcome.
Thank you armchair analyst, but governments will move on ignoring you, we dont like lung cancer sorry
If tobacco/nicotine itself isn’t banned then this could potentially get a lot of chainsmokers to switch to a relatively healthier form of smoking like dry herb vaporizers.
or they will smoke some herbs and it will be natural
Ironic that back in the 50s physicians used to prescribe smoking as a health benefit! 🙄🤣
*Actors acting as physicians on television
It helps against one disease, as far as I know (believe me I’m a doctor.).
The disease is ulcerative colitis.
Fun fact: Alcohol improves symptom of one disease too. The disease is called essential tremor.
That’s a little outdated info now, isn’t it? UC is helped by the nicotine. So why not get prescribed a patch instead?
That’s true. :) I don’t even know whether they treat UC with nicotine nowadays.
Ironic, isnt it?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t most French smokers roll their own?
Not really. In general, those who rolls their own do this because it’s less expensive
It’s increasingly rare all over. Rolling your own is cheaper but not by much these days. I always preferred the taste of self rolled when I did smoke but most smokers I’ve found, wherever you go, would prefer to smoke pre-rolled if they can
As far as I’m aware, 1637 is still made in France. Does this article only refer to pre-rolled cigarettes?
Is this just a profit saving measure?
