Increasing the price of tobacco products through tobacco taxation is one of the most effective tobacco control interventions.1 An additional benefit is that a “dedicated tobacco tax” (where some or all of the revenue raised is earmarked for specific spending or programmes) can generate revenue for funding other tobacco control and health programmes.2 3 Should dedicated tobacco taxes be introduced, it will be useful for decision makers to know whether there is support from all sociodemographic categories of smokers. Accordingly, we aimed to examine smoker support for tobacco taxes by an individual level measure of deprivation.

As part of the New Zealand arm of an international study (the International Tobacco Control (ITC) project),4 5 we surveyed a national sample of 1376 New Zealand adult (18+ years) smokers (between March 2007 and February 2008). We …