Emerging tobacco control measures
Professor Lisa A Bero of the University of Sydney told Citizen News Service (CNS) that, "Individual based interventions do not work as well as population based policy interventions in tobacco control. So we need a whole package of population based interventions. When we focused on individual smoking cessation we only got so far. But once we moved to restricting smoking areas, to second hand smoke, to tax increases, advertising restrictions, we have witnessed a huge decline in tobacco use. Plain packaging in Australia seems to be working very well--there is data to support it." (Australia banned branding from all tobacco packs and introduced plain packaging to reduce the appeal of cigarettes in 2013. It also featured strong graphic health warnings. A 12.8% decrease in tobacco consumption was recorded within two years of implementing this plain packaging legislation. Now the UK, Ireland, France and several other countries have committed to introducing plain packaging to reduce the appeal of cigarettes).
In the opinion of Dr Tara Singh Bam, The Union's Technical Advisor on Tobacco Control to Nepal and Indonesia, "Cost effective interventions like large graphic images called pictorial health warnings (PHW) on tobacco packs encourage smokers to quit; motivate youth not to start smoking; re-convince ex users to remain smoke-free and build public awareness". However, many countries still lack effective tobacco pack warnings, and some have none at all, what with the tobacco industry bending backwards to sabotage their proper implementation.
Dr Bam also finds PHW an effective intervention in eliminating illicit tobacco trade. Illegal trade of tobacco products helps to increase use of tobacco by bringing down their cost thus making them more accessible especially to youth and adults from low-income groups. Moreover, such illicit products also mislead young tobacco users by not displaying health/pictorial warnings. My first brush with illicit trade was two years ago in my home city of Lucknow, when I saw a customer purchase an Indonesian brand of cigarette (sans any pictorial warning) from a roadside kiosk.
Illicit trade also takes tax revenue away from governments, which could have otherwise been spent on the provision of public services. Tobacco companies have been known to use loopholes in tobacco control laws and are said to encourage illicit trade of tobacco products. Illicit tobacco trade thus abets tobacco usage at the cost of human health, besides strengthening corruption and weakening good governance. It undermines tobacco control policies and also leads to significant revenue losses. It is time we realized that the elimination of all forms of illicit trade, including smuggling and illegal manufacturing of cigarettes as well as smokeless tobacco products, should be an essential component of tobacco control.
Shobha Shukla, Citizen News Service - CNS
- Shared under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution License
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
