Cheaper brand to beat price hike

The Thailand Tobacco Monopoly (TTM) is aiming to launch a new, cheaper brand of cigarettes to keep smokers from rolling their own cigarettes or buying them through the illegal trade, according to a story in The New Zealand Herald.

The move follows a rise in cigarette prices caused by a tobacco tax hike.

It has been denounced by anti-smoking activists who weeks ago applauded the tax hike as a useful deterrent to smoking.

Daonoi Suttiniphapunt, director of the TTM, said the new brand, which would be slightly smaller in diameter than standard products, would be priced at about 40 baht ($1.12) a pack and launched on April 1. Currently the price of cigarettes ranges from about 48 baht to 130 baht ($1.34 to $3.64) a pack.

“We are concerned that smokers will choose other alternatives that will severely harm their bodies, such as low-quality hand-rolling tobacco,” Daonoi said in a telephone interview.

“Those who have financial limitations; they will go to cheaper and low-quality products because they have no choice,” she said. “Quitting cigarettes is not easy.”

But Dr. Ulysses Dorotheo, a program director for the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance, scoffed at this reasoning for producing cheaper cigarettes. ‘All tobacco products are harmful to health regardless of their form or source, whether roll-your-own or manufactured cigarettes, whether legal or illicit,’ he said in an email. ‘It is a farce to believe that tobacco companies are interested in protecting the health of smokers by promoting the access and use of cheap legal cigarettes.

“Producing cheap cigarettes that are affordable to the poor and the young is a strategy common to all tobacco manufacturers, whether private or state-owned, to keep tobacco products affordable in order to keep poor people addicted, entice young people to start smoking, and ultimately to maintain industry profits,” he said.