Andrew Biggs tried a few tactics to get his employee Jerd to quit smoking, and then the government decided to butt in.

Quitting was hard enough before the Tobacco Monopoly decided to butt in

Ihave a staff member whose name is Jerd. Jerd is one of my information channels into the Thai working class. He used to raise his family on the minimum wage of 300 baht a day as a rubber plantation worker. Being a benevolent employee I naturally raised that figure substantially when I hired him, and these days he is earning that amount plus an extra four or five percent; the joys of a foreign employer. Anyway, he smokes. Like swathes of rural Thailand he buys his tobacco at the end of the soi. It is a five-minute motorbike ride away if there’s petrol in the tank and/or creditors have not repossessed the vehicle. He buys his tobacco in plastic pouches at five baht per small one, 10 baht for a larger size. The larger one lasts five days.

It is the Cat brand of tobacco. The accompanying cartoon black cat appears in a state which to me looks like its tail has been shoved into an electrical socket. The pouch also features the usual picture of a man with diseased lungs in a futile but earnest effort to deter the likes of Jerd from purchasing the product.

For the last 10 years I have been on a quest to get Jerd to quit smoking. He claims it’s impossible. Once he asked me for a loan for a down payment to buy a motorbike. I said I would if he quit smoking.

“That’s impossible,” he said. “I can do anything, but not that. But can I still get the loan?”

There would be only one way for him to quit, and that would be to price cigarettes out of his purchasing power. And that is precisely what happened for a while.

He used to smoke Krong Thip cigarettes, but those are now bought only on special occasions. That is because some 10 years ago the price went up around 35 baht overnight when the Thai government discovered the joys of heavy sales tax on cigarettes under the guise of getting people to quit.

A Thai packet of cigarettes now sits at around 80 to 100 baht. Jerd’s preferred brand is 86 baht. Now and again he splurges and buys one; either that or the brand “More Boo Low”, as he calls them, which for years I figured was yet another local brand, until I once saw him buying a packet. They’re Marlboros.

This is why I abhor the Cat brand of tobacco. It is the one thing that stands between Jerd’s future lung cancer or his ability to spend extended time with his grandchildren. Without that cheap stuff around, who knows? Jerd may have given up by now.

Enter another player in this story; a woman named Daonoi Suttiniphanunt, a high-ranking Thai civil servant with Jerd’s health on her mind.

I have never met Khun Daonoi but she sounds like a reasonable, caring person. Last week she came out expressing her concern about the likes of Jerd, who while away 12-hour working days with unprocessed roll-your-own tobacco between their teeth. She does not want Jerd smoking such stuff. “I’m concerned that smokers will choose alternatives that will severely harm her bodies, such as low-quality hand-rolled tobacco,” she said last week. She believes this tobacco isn’t good quality, possesses no filters and contains a lot more residue. And she has a solution.

That solution is to produce a new brand of locally made cigarette that won’t be so hard on the pocket, priced at around 40 baht, thus making everybody happy. When I say “everybody”, I am naturally excluding anyone with a modicum of common sense.

Khun Daonoi is the director of the Thailand Tobacco Monopoly or TTM and yes, I know the name sounds a little insidious. It’s a name that would be nice in, say, North Korea, but not here in Thailand where we love democracy and free enterprise and freedom of expression and happiness.

And yet that is their own translation; a direct translation from Thai would be “Tobacco Factory” but that sounds as bland as “Tobacco Monopoly” sounds surreptitious. TTM under the umbrella of the Finance Ministry has run the local tobacco industry for the last 75 years; you can’t produce cigarettes outside its grounds, which by the way are prime inner-city real estate behind the Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre. A more benevolent government, which perhaps was looking to return happiness to its people, would boot TTM out of this property and extend the adjacent Benjakiti Park. And to be fair, just last Tuesday TTM handed over a portion of its land for that very reason.

TTM has 16 different brands with number 17, the cheap and nasty one, on its way April 1; last year alone it produced 30 billion cigarettes, or 440 cigarettes for every man, woman and child in this country. Latest figures show an annual net profit of 6.25 billion baht for 2014. Perhaps we should be calling it TCC, or Thailand Cash Cow.

One would think TTM would be happy with such figures but no. They are more than 16% down on the previous year. With a new sales tax hike of 3%, the market has shrunk a further 2%. Two per cent of 30 billion is 600 million, which I guess is a lot of cigarettes to lose. Over at the Health Ministry they’re rejoicing; Khun Daonoi’s minions are doing the opposite. Perhaps it is a case of the Thai government hedging its bets. It wants to return happiness to the people, and what greater happiness is there than good health? For the rest of the population, it is offering cheap cigarettes, thus being the first country in the world to equate lung cancer with happiness.

It’s weird because Thailand has been a frontrunner in the quest to stop its population from smoking. Have a look at the pictures on Thai cigarette packets. One features a dead body. Another shows a chest cut open revealing black lungs. Another man shows off his gangrenous appendages. Jerd complains I don’t take him to lunch and dinner enough; I blame it on the cigarette packets he places on the dinner table.

Despite its name, TTM is no longer a monopoly. Back in 1992 the Thai Tobacco Monopoly and the Thai government had to allow foreign, ie American, tobacco companies in here under the Asean free trade agreement. TTM argued against them coming in, saying that allowing them in would further damage the health of Thais, making them smoke more. Muse on that notion for a moment. In the end Thailand lost, and the country was soon flooded with legal More Boo Lows.

Nevertheless the price increase has worked in reducing smoking rates. But what about diehard smokers? What they really need is support and understanding and clever stepby-step educational programmes explaining what transpires in your body when you quit. Or you could go the easy route and just make a cheap cigarette.

“Quitting smoking is not easy,” says Khun Daonoi, who oversees the production of a drug more addictive than heroine or methamphetamines.

She’s right. Just ask Jerd, Daonoi’s target market, and so this morning I telephoned Jerd to ask if he was interested in her new product.

“How much per packet?” was his first question. “Forty baht.” “Paeng,” he shot back. Too expensive. “I’ll stick to Cat.”