There aren’t any silver bullets, magic tricks or secret hacks to solving complex public health problems. Taking on the worldwide tobacco industry and reducing the devastating consequences of smoking has taken a long time of incremental reforms.
Most of those reforms have focused on making smoking less attractive, to scale back the appeal of and demand for tobacco products. Countries which might be serious about reducing tobacco use have all increased the value through high taxes, placed graphic health warnings on packs, adopted bans on all types of tobacco promoting, and customarily made smoking socially unacceptable through indoor smoking bans and emotive campaigns in regards to the dangers of smoking.
Last week, the United Kingdom took a vital step in shifting the dial on tobacco control, to not only concentrate on reducing the appeal and demand for products, but to totally rethink how tobacco products are supplied.
Under the brand new law, the legal age for cigarette sales (currently 18) will increase by a yr every year from 2027. This means people born from 2009 won’t ever have the opportunity to legally buy cigarettes within the UK. But what does this mean for Australia and the remainder of the world?
A smoke-free generation
While some jurisdictions require tobacco retailers to have a license to sell cigarettes, and most countries put a minimum age on legal sales of all tobacco products, the UK looks set to be the primary country on this planet to phase out who can legally be sold tobacco products.
The focus of the UK law shouldn’t be to criminalise smoking, but to finish the sale of a highly addictive and uniquely dangerous product to future generations. Penalties for defying the law will include on-the-spot fines for retailers.
Aotearoa New Zealand was poised to be the primary country to implement this same sort of law in July 2024. However, when a change of presidency occurred within the 2023 election, the laws was repealed as a part of a coalition negotiation. The law was dropped alongside other public health measures that were set to scale back the variety of tobacco stores and a plan to scale back nicotine in cigarettes.
Undue tobacco industry interference and influence is viewed by public health experts as the first factor in overturning these laws. Just as when Australia became the primary country to implement tobacco plain packaging laws in 2012the UK will must be vigilant in pushing back against these same powerful business interests.
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What’s happening in Australia now?
At the tip of last yr, a much-needed package of tobacco control reforms was passed in Australia. These include refreshing the now dated graphic health warnings on tobacco packages, requiring the tobacco industry to report its sales data and marketing activities, and revamping the tobacco promoting laws to capture recent types of digital marketing and vaping products.
These measures are all wholly welcome by the health sector and might be rolled out over the approaching months.
While this suite of latest reforms doesn’t address the availability of tobacco products, the National Tobacco Strategy 2023–2030 has a goal to scale back each day smoking prevalence to five% or less by 2030. Current each day smoking in Australia is at 10.6%, and provided we proceed to innovate and adopt progressive policies we will reach this goal. Of course, we should always not be content to stop at 5%, but must embrace a goal of being a smoke-free country.
One of the key priority areas to succeed in this goal is to “strengthen regulation to scale back the availability, availability and accessibility of tobacco products”. Specifically, the National Tobacco Strategy will “consider the feasibility of raising the minimum age of purchase of tobacco products and monitor international developments on this matter”.
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There is a transparent government mandate to maintain in line with international best-practice in tobacco control. This is the important thing reason the tobacco industry opposes revolutionary law reforms so strongly, even in relatively small countries like New Zealand.
When a public health measure is successfully adopted and proven effective in a single nation, it has a habit of spreading quite quickly to others. As an example, plain packaging laws at the moment are commonplace after surviving multiple tobacco industry legal challenges in Australia. So we may soon see similar age-restrictive laws introduced in Australia and other countries.
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A public health priority
Australia is currently debating laws that may place further restrictions on how vaping products are sold. In these proposed laws, now we have a possibility to guard young people from lifelong addiction.
If passed, these laws may even set a robust precedent that harmful and addictive products mustn’t be sold as consumer goods in the identical shops that sell on a regular basis household groceries like bread, fruit and milk.
When it involves smoking, future generations will look back and shake their heads that we ever allowed a product that kills 20,500 Australians a yr to be so casually available, anywhere and any time.