TOBACCO: Last puff postponed

▪ 1995

      The World Health Organization (WHO), seeing smoking as the most preventable cause of ill health worldwide, edged in 1994 a little closer to its objective of a smoke-free world, while it dropped the year 2000 as the target date. WHO predicted that if current trends continued unchecked, tobacco would eventually kill some 500 million people. In advanced countries, where persuasion was reinforced by ever tougher regulations, the message was thoroughly familiar, and the remaining smokers were perhaps irredeemable. The less developed two-thirds of the world presented huge obstacles to reformers—not least the 21 million people there who were employed by the tobacco industry.

      Cigarette smoking continued to fall in the U.S. and in many other advanced countries. Often concerned that smoking among the young was a gateway into drug abuse, governments, with the press and broadcast media as allies, stepped up educational campaigns on the health risks of smoking. By 1994 health warnings appeared on most of the world's cigarette packs, and tides of legislation narrowly confined the public places where smokers could legally indulge their habit. Sharp rises in tobacco taxes, sanctified on public health grounds, yielded governments an estimated $125 billion in 1994.

      Attempts to win over the world's 850 million smokers to healthier lifestyles were most dedicated where the antitobacco movement started—in North America and Western Europe. Europe was overtaking the New World in legislative restraints, with European Union limits on cigarette tar and nicotine contents. Countries that banned cigarette advertising sought to get others to do the same. What began as an anticigarette movement in Europe was broadened to condemn all forms of tobacco consumption. North America's main contribution to the quit-smoking campaign was its innovative forms of attack, including moves by U.S. government agencies to classify tobacco as a drug and to establish that "passive smoking" (exposure to other people's smoke) can cause cancer. Canada had a project requiring that cigarettes be sold in plain packs, without brand imagery. On both sides of the Atlantic, unrepentant smokers felt that campaigning had become a jihad, setting smoker against nonsmoker and stubbing out the mutual tolerance to which advanced nations are dedicated.

      In the other two-thirds of the world, where most of the world's tobacco was consumed, virtually every country had an antismoking policy, with taxes on tobacco products and a patchwork of deterrent regulations varying from the determined—in Singapore and Australasia—to the well-intentioned but purely nominal. In large and populous Third World countries, where law enforcement was difficult or casual, the impact was high among the educated and prosperous classes but low among others. On balance, it looked like a long haul for any thoroughgoing reform of one of the world's favourite vices.

      (MICHAEL F. BARFORD)

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