While New Zealand announces a plan to ban the sale of tobacco to its next generation, Brazil has set a target of a 40% reduction in the prevalence of smokers by 2030 — representing 5.9% of the population. For experts, a restrictive law such as New Zealand is unthinkable in the country.
According to them, even the current target may not be met if the for sale from electronic cigarettes. Anvisa (National Health Surveillance Agency) is preparing a review of the legislation on the subject and has until the end of this month to present the result of the report of the discussions.
The measures announced by the New Zealand government on Thursday (8), including a federal law ban on anyone born after 2008 from purchasing cigarettes or tobacco products during their lifetime, were commemorated by health authorities around the world. .
Tobacco companies, on the other hand, expressed concern about the impact on their business and warned that such bans tend to play into the hands of criminals who sell illicit products. This happened in Bhutan. The small Asian kingdom tried to ban tobacco in 2005 and the result was a massive smuggling of Indian cigarettes.
For Brazilian specialists, there is absolutely no political condition for the country to follow a path similar to that of New Zealand, which also announced a significant restriction on places where cigarettes can be sold. The number of authorized stores will be reduced from around 8,000 to less than 500, say authorities in the country of 5 million people.
“It makes you jealous [da Nova Zelândia]. In Brazil, all actions that depend on the law slip into the political pressure that the tobacco industry exerts on Brazilian parliamentarians”, says Dr. Tânia Cavalcante, executive secretary of Conicq (National Commission for the Implementation of the Framework Convention for the Control of Tobacco), linked to Inca (National Cancer Prevention Institute).
New Zealand’s initiative is part of a broader tobacco crackdown called globally the “endgame” which aims to reduce smoking rates to less than 5%. Most countries, such as Canada and Sweden, intend to reach this goal by 2030. New Zealand wants this to happen as early as 2025.
In Russia, a law similar to the one in New Zealand has been discussed since 2004, but smoke-free generation still has no date to arrive. The government has not yet found the breath to approve a tobacco ban for young people.
“In Brazil, this is still unthinkable [medidas adotadas na Nova Zelândia]. These measures are difficult to assess because they have not been adopted. We don’t know what the public’s reaction will be. It has been discussed for a long time what other measures, in addition to the basic ones, such as increasing tobacco taxation, banning advertising and warnings on labels, could be adopted when it reaches a level where it is no longer possible to reduce the prevalence”, says Paula Johns, director general of ACT Health Promotion.
A world reference, the national program to combat smoking in Brazil managed to reduce the percentage of smokers in the country from 30% to 12.8% of the population between 1986 and 2019. In 2020, Vigitel detected a prevalence of 9.5%, but the data are only from Brazilian capitals.
The current scenario, however, has a yellow light, says Tânia Cavalcante. “The drop in the proportion of smokers among young people has stagnated. Research also shows that there is reasonable experimentation with electronic cigarettes among them. This is worrying because it shows a future trend.”
A study by Inca found that half of the people who use or have used these products, being a quarter of them young, never used conventional cigarettes.
A systematic review, also by Inca, concluded that the use of electronic cigarettes increases by three times the risk of trying conventional cigarettes and by more than four times the risk of becoming a smoker. The article, published in the journal Ciência & Saúde Coletiva, analyzed 29 studies from different countries, with a total of more than 130 thousand people.
“The challenge is these new products whose prevalence is increasing among the young public. There is still a lot of controversy surrounding them. There are those who claim that they are much less harmful than cigarettes, but there are other additives that we still don’t even know what impacts they will have. you can say nothing without a social experiment like that of conventional cigarettes,” says Paula Johns.
Public health advocates that the sale of these electronic devices remain prohibited. The tobacco industry, on the other hand, is pressing for the release under the argument of harm reduction, adopted and accepted in developed countries, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom and the European Union. In 2017, New Zealand also embraced electronic cigarettes as a way to help smokers stop smoking.
The goal for Brazil to reach 2030 with a prevalence of smokers 40% lower than the current one is part of a plan to fight non-communicable chronic diseases. “Our vaccine is the political will to face the interference of the tobacco industry. It is unacceptable for an industry to continue using people’s lungs to offer nicotine and all the garbage that goes with it”, says Tânia Cavalcante.
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