Tobacco control is cancer control. And chronic disease control. And child poverty reduction. And so on and so on. More than half a century of scientific evidence bears witness to the harmfulness of smoking cigarettes and the benefits of stopping smoking for individuals, their whanau and society. Therefore, if the new government truly wants to achieve the health system targets it will set for our new health system, one of the best bangs for the buck is drastically reducing smoking in our population.
That is what the three strategies in the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act (SERPA) seek to achieve rapidly and equitably. Reducing retailer numbers, taking nicotine (the addictive element) from tobacco, and the Smokefree Generation strategy are all evidence-based approaches with overwhelming support from the public – including smokers – health professionals and their professional societies, NGOs, and leading tobacco control scientists. But it appears the new government wants to repeal the Act. In so doing, it is turning our health over to the tobacco industry.
Dr Reti and other Ministers, including the Prime Minister, have responded to pushback from tobacco control advocates with arguments that come straight from the tobacco industry playbook – the Act would boost the illegal trade in tobacco and, with it, gang violence and ram raids; and that individual rights to choose to smoke trump collective benefits from tobacco control. Such arguments have no basis in fact, ignore decades of evidence about the addictiveness of nicotine, and overlook community voices, in particular Māori calls for decisive tobacco control actions.
In a case of “damn the evidence, full steam ahead”, the new Minister appears impervious to any amount of rational debate, demonstration of unbiased evidence, or appeals to his moral compass and ethical responsibility as a medical practitioner. In the new year, I hope that our political leaders will have had time to reflect on the evidence and extent and depth of reaction to their proposed repeal. I hope they will make a New Year’s resolution that will benefit all New Zealanders for years to come: to overturn their plans to repeal the Act. In so doing, they could save more than 8000 New Zealanders’ from premature deaths and many more people from years of chronic ill health.
This, in turn, would reduce the demands on our already overburdened healthcare system and deliver wider social, cultural, environmental and economic benefits that far outweigh any value from the revenue derived from enabling smokers to continue to puff, in support of tax cuts. That’s not just wishful thinking: it’s research-based evidence.
