OPINION: In chess, the endgame begins when most pieces have been taken off the board. With just a handful left, options narrow and moves become more decisive.

So it is with smoking. Public-health types use the phrase “tobacco endgame” to mean a happy situation where the proportion of people who smoke has fallen below 5 per cent.

For any country to have come close to that, many tactics will probably have been used already: gigantic health warnings, age restrictions, plain packaging, disgusting pictures of cancerous lungs, stiff taxes, public-smoking bans and so on. Yet still, some people keep smoking. The endgame requires creativity and political will.

New Zealand has been a pioneer. It has banned cigarette adverts and smoking in most public places. Now it is going further.

On December 9 the government laid out measures “to make New Zealand smokefree”.

From 2024 it will reduce the number of shops allowed to sell cigarettes. The following year, it will lower the amount of nicotine permissible in cigarettes. And most far-reaching of all, from 2027 it will make it illegal to sell cigarettes to anybody born after 2008.

Such people will never be allowed to buy tobacco legally. Only Bhutan, which bans tobacco for everyone, has a stricter policy.

Some 4,500-5,000 New Zealanders are among the 7.7m people who die from smoking-related causes every year, roughly the same proportion as its share of the global population.

The country has made progress in reducing smoking rates: 13.4 per cent of adult Kiwis smoked in 2019-20, down from 18.2 per cent in 2011-12, compared with a global average of around 20 per cent in 2019.

However, the proportion of Māori who smoke is much higher, at 31.4 per cent. It is this group at which the new policies are mainly aimed. The government pitches its plan as a way to “eliminate inequities in smoking rates and smoking-related illnesses”.

Such aims are laudable, as is the government’s admission that pushing tobacco taxes any higher would unfairly penalise the poor, who are likelier to be addicts, and “further punish smokers who are struggling to kick the habit”, as the Associate Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall put it.

However, the new policies are misguided. Start with cutting the amount of nicotine in cigarettes: the idea is that it will wean smokers off the most addictive substance in the cancer sticks.

Yet as any smoker -or European vape user who has sampled the satisfyingly high-nicotine liquids available outside the EU – can attest, lower nicotine levels only make them want to puff more. Nicotine may be the most addictive bit of a smoke, but it is not the most harmful. The main causes of disease are the tar, the toxic chemicals and the inhalation of smoke from a fire two inches away from your nose.

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More unwise still is the plan to enforce prohibition for the next generation of potential smokers. Banning popular substances has unintended consequences, as alcohol prohibition once showed in America, and the war on drugs shows nearly everywhere today. The market moves underground. Criminals take over.

Supplies are no longer regulated, so quality suffers: all manner of harmful extras may be added. Worse, criminal gangs make so much money from prohibition that they corrupt governments and fight bloody battles with each other over turf.

No doubt a well-run country like New Zealand will suffer less lawlessness from the gradual prohibition of tobacco than Al Capone’s Chicago did from the sudden banning of booze, or modern-day Mexico does from America’s war on drugs. But it will suffer some.

Indeed, it already does. Thanks to cigarette prices twice as high as in Singapore and six times as high as in China, a tenth of the tobacco consumed in 2019 in New Zealand was illicit.

Smoking is a disgusting, expensive and largely pointless habit, as many smokers will cheerfully admit. It imposes costs not only on those who puff but also on those around them.

So it is appropriate to restrict smoking, and to tax cigarettes stiffly, as most rich countries do, to discourage consumption and make sure that smokers more than pay for the extra costs they impose on public health-care systems.

But prohibition is a step too far. Liberal societies tolerate all sorts of evils– look no further than alcohol–on the grounds that the state’s business is to regulate for safety and to minimise harm, not to tell people how to live their lives. Smoking should be no different.