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| BRITISH DOCTORS: END SMOKING BY 2025 |
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Page 1 of 2  Plus: FDA control-of-tobacco bill probably dead for 2008Los Angeles, September 11 – “The Royal College of Physicians says radical measures are needed to curb smoking: swinging increases in tobacco tax; tougher penalties for tobacco smugglers; and promoting alternative forms of nicotine. The college says the approach ‘has the potential to end tobacco smoking in the UK within the next 20 years.’” That report appeared in the British newspaper The Independent and marked the College’s latest broadside against tobacco in a country in which 22% of the adult population (about 10 million people) are estimated to be smokers. It has filed a report called Ending Tobacco Smoking in Britain and according to the report, “says the tax on tobacco should be increased by 10 per cent every year, and its sale restricted to licensed retailers in premises, such as off-licences, from which children should be banned. Although the major emphasis of the report is on cigarettes, cigars are clearly included in the program design suggested. In the words of the report, “The primary objective of regulation of smoked tobacco should be to make smoking and smoked tobacco products as unappealing, unattractive, unaffordable and unavailable as possible, as quickly as possible.” Among the many suggestions are to license all tobacco sales outlets, to constantly increase the minimum annual license fee to essentially close all small tobacconists (which would surely include almost all cigar shops in the country), eliminate Internet sales of tobacco, restrict the hours during which tobacco products could be sold, restrict or eliminate all advertising expenditures and insist on “plain generic packaging” for all tobacco products. The report also suggests “Penalties for smugglers should be increased to match those for class-A drugs such as heroin and imposed also on those who sell cigarettes to children.” The report also wants to increase and availability of fast-acting nicotine-delivery devices to take the place of cigarettes and is also in favor of non-smoked tobacco products such as snus, allowing “limited market access to low-hazard harm reduction products of proven efficacy.” Naturally, there’s a new governmental agency to be created in all of this, a “Nicotine Regulatory Authority,” which would be empowered to do many of the things that the U.S. Food & Drug Administration would be required to do if the current bill before the U.S. Congress were to become law. The result, according to the study: Given that conventional tobacco control methods can reduce prevalence by up to one percentage point per year, and that a harm reduction strategy (using an example based on a non-medicinal product) has been estimated to be likely to reduce smoking prevalence by a further 0.4 of a percentage point a year, the Nicotine Regulatory Authority should be expected to achieve an average annual decline of at least 1.4 percentage points per year.Professor John Britton, who chairs the College’s anti-tobacco group told The Independent, “We could [eliminate smoking] if we did everything we know how to do.” Comment: Let there not be any doubt of where the antis are going, in Britain, in Europe or in the U.S.: we are reliving Prohibition a century after the dramatic failure of the anti-drinking laws in America. |
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Did you know?
“Cigars, as we know them today, began serious production in Seville, Spain around 1676.
