Editorial

In the European Union, over a third of 15- to 24-year-olds smoke. Why does this happen if it is a well-known fact that smoking kills half its users, amounting to 650,000 persons in the EU alone every year. Individuals usually start smoking because of peer pressure and then become hooked as a result of substances deliberately added to cigarettes to encourage addiction!

What remains outrageous in the recent Eurobarometer statistics is the number of individuals - up to a quarter of EU citizens - who are still exposed to second-hand smoke. More than a third of Maltese respondents said that when they last visited a bar, individuals were still blatantly smoking despite the ban that was introduced in 2004.

Government ministers keep saying and promising that they are determined to reduce tobacco consumption. People are told that advertising will be reduced or banned, that horrific pictures will be printed on tobacco packets along with the usual health warnings, that rules are being promulgated to prevent exposure to second hand smoke! The statistics clearly indicate that this is too little, too late.

The most effective and, perhaps, only way to discourage smoking is to make tobacco prohibitively expensive. Raising the price by 10c per Budget is evidently not working. The latest Eurobarometer survey in fact revealed that the present cost of cigarettes had little effect on smokers and many still continued to light up despite almost yearly increases in price. Only one in five said they had quit smoking because of an increase in cigarette prices in the past year and three out of four admitted that price was not really an issue. Personal health concerns are more of a deterrent, as eight out of 10 of those who quit smoking in the past year did so for health reasons, even if rather late in the day!

If tobacco were made too expensive to buy and this would, in turn, lead to a drop in tobacco sales, the government would stand to lose a significant and irreplaceable chunk of revenue in the short term. However, it would save huge amounts of money in the long term because the complete health benefits of smoking bans could take between 20 and 30 years to be realised.

The short term loss of direct excise revenue will be felt by the Exchequer immediately. However, the long-term savings would not be realised by the government of the day, which makes taking effective action in this direction very unlikely since governments tend to think in terms of five-year stints.

The savings that can be made are almost incalculable in terms of lives saved, heart attacks and strokes delayed or avoided, reduction in numbers of respiratory cripples from chronic lung disease, lower cancers risks, reduction in infertility and impotence, less harm to unborn babies.

The list is endless. Think of the revenue saved in surgical and other interventions, the amount of medicines that would not be needed, the number of people who would survive and continue to pay taxes on personal revenue... This would only happen if a government were to think outside the five-year box and raise the price of tobacco to such a level that the non-smoking population would not have to pay taxes to fund the treatment of smokers.