WHO: Stringent legal measures needed to curb smoking

The longer we wait for government measures to impose stricter penalties on tobacco consumption, the more lives will be lost, a World Health Organisation (WHO) representative said at the 14th Gulf Symposium on Tobacco Control on Wednesday.

“Tobacco currently kills one person every six seconds. I have not taken six seconds to talk but already one person is gone. The longer we wait, the more people we will allow to be killed,” Edouard Tursan D’espaignet, Coordinator of the Comprehensive Information System for Tobacco Control, World Health Orgnisation (WHO), told Gulf News.

D’espaignet, however, said that it is not only the number of deaths that the public should be wary about but also the social burden and risks brought about by second-hand smoking.

“It is not just the killing. Babies are born with low birth weight because their mothers either smoked or their father smoked in the presence of the mother. The more we wait, the more time we waste or we are not active into putting the legislation into place, we are helping our people to not be as healthy as they could be,” D’espaignet added.

The battle against smoking, which has become a global pandemic, has reached an alarming status that prompted heads of government to draft and approve the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in 2003.

The UAE, which ratified FCTC in 2005, has taken a number of steps in the fight against tobacco use by issuing the anti-tobacco federal law in 2009. But its bylaw or implementing regulations are yet to be approved by cabinet.

Industry intervention

Dr Wedad Al Maidoor, Head of the National Tobacco Control Programme, said that one of the reasons why the bylaws are taking time to be passed is that many government branches need to go through the whole bylaw before it gets passed. Another reason, she said, was tobacco industry intervention.

“They [tobacco industry] do too much lobbying, that’s why we have encountered so many problems, especially when we wanted to issue the pictorial [graphic images on cigarette packets], from 2009,” Dr Al Maidoor said, adding that the country has so far succeeded in this aspect in that all graphic images on the hazards of smoking will be implemented GCC-wide by August this year.

Raising taxes on tobacco products, the most effective measure to curb smoking according to studies, however, has not been as successful in the Gulf as it is in other countries like US, Australia, and UK.

Increasing taxation

“We have tried since 15 years ago to our best level of efforts to increase taxation for smoking and it reached to 100 per cent taxation but we are looking to do it around 200 per cent like UK, like USA, Australia and other countries but we did not succeed,” said Dr Tawfik Bin Ahmad Khoja, Director-General, Executive Office of GCC Health Ministers Council.

“I think the tobacco industry is very strong globally. We are now doing another trial in increasing taxation and there will be taxation for environmental pollution, taxation other than the [on the] price of tobacco only]. We are planning to have this in all GCC countries,” Dr Khoja said.