Here is the news: 13 people died yesterday in an entirely preventable tragedy.
Here is tomorrow's news: a further 13 people have died as the result of a predictable disaster.
Here is the news for the day after tomorrow: yet another 13 people have perished in what is widely considered to have been an avoidable calamity.
That the scale of this ongoing affliction, which this year will kill almost 5000 New Zealanders, and the certainty it will occur, remain peripheral to the public consciousness only exacerbates the tragedy.
Imagine if it could be foretold, with equal certainty, that tomorrow on a particular road at a particular intersection a vehicle crash would occur in which 13 people would be killed.
And imagine the uproar that, aware of this, the Government, the Ministry of Transport and the police, and motorists themselves did nothing to prevent it.
Every year in this country smoking kills about 10 times the number of people who die on the roads.
One of the problems of addressing, publicising and curtailing the number of deaths due to smoking is the diffuse, cumulative and often invisible nature of the diseases though which mortality occurs.
Smoking harms nearly every organ and system in the body.
It is the cause of 80% of lung cancer cases and is linked to many other cancers.
It is a major cause of heart attacks, heart disease, stroke and respiratory diseases such as emphysema and chronic bronchitis.
It is estimated that half of this country's 700,000 smokers - about a fifth of the 15-plus population - will die from a smoking-related disease and that those smokers will lose on average 15 years of life compared with non-smokers.
It will account for 31% of all Maori deaths.
Further, the health system spends more than $200 million annually on treating smoking-related diseases; and the overall costs to society through lost productivity, loss of income for housing, nutrition, and retirement savings is estimated at up to $22.5 billion. The Ministry of Health is, in fact, only too aware of this and far from doing nothing has a proactive strategy for reducing the number of tobacco-related deaths.
In 2004, it deployed legislation to become the third country in the world after Ireland and Norway to make all indoor workplaces including bars and restaurants, smoke-free, following years of definitive research showing that passive smoking and second-hand smoke kills an estimated 388 non-smokers in the country every year.
It promotes the health benefits of non-smoking, and it has active stop-smoking services, including subsidised nicotine replacement therapy.
But perhaps the strongest and most effective tool in the smoking-reduction box is the lever of taxation.
As the new Parliamentary year gets under way in the next two or three weeks one of the questions swirling around in the political ether will be whether or not the Budget in May will impose an excise increase on tobacco greater than the consumer price index, by which it increases every year.
The excise on tobacco was last increased above the CPI in 2000 and comparison with other countries suggests that there is room for movement.
At present in New Zealand, excise and sales tax as a percentage or retail tobacco prices stand at 70%: this is above Australia at 62%, but lower than Canada (76%), New York city (77.4%), Britain (80%) and France (80%).
In other words, it is cheaper to smoke in New Zealand than in many other developed nations.
But another way of looking at this - given the enormous health and social costs of smoking - is that non-smokers in this country subsidise smokers to a greater extent than in many others.
Further, in the coming world of health-care "rationing" it becomes increasingly less tenable that scarce resources are used to patch up patients whose illnesses are patently self-inflicted.
The Government should not be coy about raising taxes on tobacco.
The imperative to do so is compelling, and neither should it be deterred by suggestions from pro-smoking lobbies or the tobacco industry that this amounts to a curtailment of individual liberties; or that it smacks of "nanny-statism".
Experts in the field and politicians alike agree it is an effective disincentive to both taking up or continuing to smoke.
It should, however, be accompanied by renewed impetus in national education campaigns: how many people, smokers and non-smokers alike, are aware, for example, that cigarette smoke contains a mixture of more than 4000 chemicals including acetone (paint-stripper), ammonia (toilet cleaner), hydrogen cyanide (rat killer) DDT (insecticide), and carbon monoxide? Small wonder it eventually kills.
