¿Por qué nosotros no? Acción Ciudadana por la Salud y el cambio de la Ley Española de Tabaco

Inspiring progress in US may lead way to smoke-free world

13/02/2014 China Post

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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