IF you’re a smoker who wants to indulge your habit while gazing over the mountains of the South Pacific, you’d do well to move fast. New Zealand last month announced plans to become the first nation in the world to ban tobacco.
Prohibition won’t happen overnight. Instead, the country will raise the legal smoking age each year, so that people born after 2008 will never be allowed to puff. That will eventually mean that tobacco smoking – a practice that’s been prevalent in the Americas for thousands of years, and spread around the world after Christopher Columbus introduced it to Europe – may finally start disappearing from one corner of the planet.