Inspiring progress in US may lead way to smoke-free world
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
The China Post news staff
On Wednesday, the largest drug store chain in the United States stated its intention to stop
selling cigarette products by October of this year. CVS Caremark explained its decision in a
press release, saying that “cigarettes and providing health care just don't go together in the
same setting.”
The New York Times quoted a market analyst as saying that CVS' decision is not likely to
affect overall sales of tobacco because convenience stores account for two-thirds of tobacco
sales.
Last month also saw the fiftieth anniversary of the Terry report, the landmark U.S. Surgeon
General's report that presaged a shift in public thinking about and consumption of cigarettes.
In the half century since, the number of smokers in the U.S. has declined from 42 percent of
the population to 18 percent.
Concurrent advisories on the rate of smoking point out how serious the problem remains.
Premature deaths caused by smoking globally will kill more than five million this year,
according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From lung cancer to heart
disease to diabetes, the harmful effects of smoking have been established over and over
again.
One of the great tensions between the obligation to safeguard the public good and modern
day commerce is the fact that tobacco is allowed to be sold at all. Granted, there are
historical reasons for the spread of tobacco, including its status as a key product in the
mercantilist economy imperial powers used to exploit peoples of the world.
Thus, the entrenched position of tobacco as a central part of some people's lives, and the
difficulty society encounters in rooting it out has to be placed in context that, realistically
speaking, no country has yet been able to successfully declare cigarettes legally prohibited.
Those who have done so, such as Qing China, did not see their success last.
Indeed, a major moral imperative for reducing smoking is the even more harmful effects of
second-hand smoke. Research shows that second-hand smoke is particularly unhealthy,
especially the smoke that is not filtered by the cigarette. This means that smokers are slowly
killing those they victimize by emitting harmful gas full of carcinogens into the surrounding air.
There are more than three million smokers in Taiwan, and twenty thousand people in the
country die every year from tobacco-related diseases, according to the fifth Cross-Strait
Conference On Tobacco Control in 2011. A presentation published by the conference also
points out that the poor smoke more and spend a full ten percent of their income on tobacco
products.
The structural distribution of smokers in society presents a dilemma: according to the Ministry
of Health and Welfare's statistics, only five to fifteen percent of military officers who graduated
between 2006 and 2008 smoked, whereas a far higher percentage of enlisted personnel
smoke — from 40 to 46 percent.
The dilemma in this skewed distribution of smokers points to a displayed vulnerability in a
particular class or group of people. Of the likely distinguishing factors, education stands out
as a key divider, because an officer's commission requires a university degree.
In fact, research shows groups with less education tend to smoke more, according to Wu
Deh-ming of the National Defense University's Medical School.
Given the twin association of the disadvantaged — in levels of education and income — with
higher rates of tobacco usage, society must tackle the issue by continuing to increase taxes
and institute facility limits for smokers while also singling out its efforts in particular for the
disadvantaged class.
Some of those efforts might be preventative measures creatively aimed at the vulnerable.
There may be no single cure-all policy that can hasten tobacco's demise, but we encourage
the current policy of increasing restrictions on available smoking spaces.
A long-term solution could be downgrading the cultural status of smoking to a further
unappealing, “un-cool” appearance. Our hope is for a smoke-free home and a smoke-free
world. In today's paper, we are running an AP report titled “Experts increasingly contemplate
the end of smoking,” showing a utopia for public health advocates - perhaps a smoking rate
of less than five percent - that nonetheless will not come until perhaps 2050. That is a far-off
goal, but it is one on the right track as it is dogged and realistic, combining the right
motivation with an appreciation of the complicated historical baggage of the blight of
smoking.
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