Under-aged smoking in Malta: a call for action

It is encouraging to note the correspondence that has been published in your paper with respect to smoking and the public lobby in favour of smoke-free public places, which is one of many aspects in tobacco control that the Health Promotion Department has been advocating for years.

As has already been inferred by many readers, education against the hazards of smoking is important, but it should not be the only strategy allowed and encouraged. This is also true in the case of other legal drugs, e.g. alcohol.

In fact education alone does not protect our young people and passive smokers from the danger that smoking poses. A similar analogy can be argued with respect to alcohol.

I would like to share with your readers some early analysis from this year's Health Behaviour Survey in school-aged children (HBSC), which clearly reveals that in Malta there has been a sharp increase in smoking among under- aged youth from the last survey carried out in 2000.

The HBSC is an international survey conducted in collaboration with the World Health Organisation which the Health Promotion Department has successfully completed this year with the valuable help of the Education Division.

In 2002 our findings reveal that 24.7 per cent of under 16-year-olds have tried smoking, which is a shocking increase to our earlier findings in 2000 where 19.5 per cent had been found to have tried smoking.

Concurrently there has also been an increase in under-age youth who report smoking daily: in 2000, 2.9 per cent of under-16s were smoking daily and in 2002 it is now up to 5.1 per cent.

These alarming results give further proof that education alone is insufficient to keep our young people away from addictive drugs, like nicotine and alcohol. These results substantiate the current evidence that many top researchers in the field have been documenting for years, namely that advertising and heavy marketing by far outweigh the cumulative effects of sporadic health education sessions in schools and poorly funded educational campaigns.

It is an established fact that the tobacco industry has excelled in enticing youths to smoke their first cigarette well before their 16th birthday, which is the first step to a lifelong addiction that kills the smoker in his/her prime years - a death sentence par excellence!

This does not mean that health education is not an important aspect of tobacco control, but it must be complemented with other measures if a decrease in tobacco consumption is to be achieved. In this respect, Malta's tobacco control efforts must be courageously stepped up to include, among others:

¤ protection from environmental tobacco smoke for non-smokers in workplaces and public places;

¤ bans on advertising, sponsorship, marketing and vending machines;

¤ increase in the legal age for the sale of tobacco products;

¤ improved labelling and health warnings on tobacco products which should also contain graphic depicting of the harm attributed to using the product;

¤ increase in the funding for tobacco control efforts from duty paid on cigarette sales;

¤ free access to smoking cessation aids for smokers seeking to quit the addiction; and

¤ updating the existing Tobacco (Smoking Control) Act of 1986.

Unless a multipronged strategy is adopted, the HBSC results in 2006 and thereafter will continue to shock and so will our annual mortality rates due to smoking-related illnesses.

There are some who might describe tobacco control measures as draconian. For those of us who believe in the right to life and in the obligation to protect health, it is irresponsible, bordering on the criminal, to ignore the spelt out facts and not to take the necessary action.