Are there other alternatives than snus?

Sir, in How Europe can help snuff out smoking John Gapper points in the direction of the Swedish “snus”, a grinded tobacco you place under your stiffly curved upper lip. I have used it, 40 years ago, I liked it, but I can also testify against its total absence of esthetics, when brown liquid tobacco drips down between your front teeth. In fact giving up smoking this way might also require giving up other things as well, like dating.

An interesting alternative was also presented in 2005 by two professors of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Robert Haveman and Jon Mullahy who then proposed a scheme for their local community where bars could trade smoking permits as a mean let the market arbitrage the difficulties of imposing non-smoking bans. Though cute, the idea seems not to have taken off, and I suspect is primarily because if a bar wanted to be a non-smoking bar it would always come out as a seller of smoking rights, while a bar that wanted to allow smoking would always be a buyer, something that does not rhyme well with market efficiency. The possibility of assigning a fix number of smoking permits per square foot/hour and auctioning them off to the patrons on a continuous basis, with any rights so acquired expiring within a short time period, could be an option favored by the derivatives community, as it would allow for the trading in second hand smoke risk and perhaps even a market in not-smoking-guarantees.

Whatever, the difficulties enocuntered in the area of quitting smoking should be used when analyzing the practical and ethical aspects of quitting carbon emissions, like for instancce when we think of leaving the solutions for the climate change in the hands of the trading of carbon-emission rights, and which though reminiscent of the indulgencies (shamefully) traded by the Catholic church centuries ago, lately seem to have captured the interest of some mainly protestant countries.