Cough it up, Lebanon

ENAR

Every year Lebanon loses the population of a small village, about 3,500 people, not to emigration but to needless death from smoking-related diseases. For all the furor around Lebanon’s current smoking ban, little is said about the simple policy instrument that has proven the most effective in reducing tobacco consumption and raising government revenue around the world: higher tobacco taxes. When you ask a Lebanese politician why our state does not apply this instrument and each year fails to raise excise taxes on tobacco, the immutable answer is smuggling. At first it seems a logical retort, and there is an historical precedence to back it up.  Lebanon once increased tobacco taxes as a proportion to pack price from the current 51 percent to 113 percent in 1999. Back then, the revenues of the Regie Libanaise du Tabac et Tombacs (Regie), Lebanon’s tobacco monopoly under the Ministry of Finance, fell by