>Higher Prices do not stop bad behavior. See tobacco and alcohol. You've never stuck me before as being that simplistic.

Better tell that to Big Tobacco because they seem mighty concerned over higher prices/taxes:

Philip Morris: Of all the concerns, there is one - taxation - that alarms us the most. While marketing
restrictions and public and passive smoking [restrictions] do depress volume, in our experience taxation
depresses it much more severely. Our concern for taxation is, therefore, central to our thinking . . . .
• Philip Morris: When the tax goes up, industry loses volume and profits as many smokers cut back.
• RJ Reynolds: If prices were 10% higher, 12-17 incidence [youth smoking] would be 11.9% lower.
• Philip Morris: It is clear that price has a pronounced effect on the smoking prevalence of teenagers,
and that the goals of reducing teenage smoking and balancing the budget would both be served by
increasing the Federal excise tax on cigarettes.
• Philip Morris: Jeffrey Harris of MIT calculated…that the 1982-83 round of price increases caused two
million adults to quit smoking and prevented 600,000 teenagers from starting to smoke…We don’t need to
have that happen again.
• Philip Morris: A high cigarette price, more than any other cigarette attribute, has the most dramatic impact
on the share of the quitting population…price, not tar level, is the main driving force for quitting.


The cigarette companies have even publicly admitted the effectiveness of tax increases to deter smoking in
their required filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
• Philip Morris: Tax increases are expected to continue to have an adverse impact on sales of tobacco
products by our tobacco subsidiaries, due to lower consumption levels... [10-Q Report, November 3, 2008]
• Lorillard Tobacco: We believe that increases in excise and similar taxes have had an adverse impact on
sales of cigarettes. In addition, we believe that future increases, the extent of which cannot be predicted,
could result in further volume declines for the cigarette industry, including Lorillard Tobacco... [10-Q
Report, November 4, 2008]
• R.J. Reynolds: Together with manufacturers’ price increases in recent years and substantial increases in
state and federal taxes on tobacco products, these developments have had and will likely continue to
have an adverse effect on the sale of tobacco products. [10-Q Report, October 24, 2008]
Or, as the Convenience Store News put it: “It's not a hard concept to grasp -- as taxes on cigarettes goes
up, sales of cigarettes go down.”



Research studies have also found that:
• Cigarette price and tax increases work even more effectively to reduce smoking among males, Blacks,
Hispanics, and lower-income smokers.
• A cigarette tax increase that raises prices by ten percent will reduce smoking among pregnant women by
seven percent, preventing thousands of spontaneous abortions and still-born births, and saving tens of
thousands of newborns from suffering from smoking-affected births and related health consequences.


http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/research/factsheets/pdf/0146.pdf