Smoking rebounding

Policies that were implemented in Mexico 14 years ago to discourage smoking were initially successful, judging by the statistics, but the practice is back on the rise, according to a story in the Mexico Daily News.

Euromonitor International was said to have found that legal cigarette sales dropped by 35 percent between 2005 and 2013, from 45.9 billion to 29.9 billion a year, prompting the firm to forecast that the market would continue to drop by 1.4 percent annually during the following five years.

But the forecast was off.

Now Euromonitor has revealed the tobacco industry saw some recovery in 2016 when sales increased by almost three percent, bolstered my new smokers aged 15 to 24.

In fact, industry revenues were up by more than 64 percent last year.

According to the National Institute of Respiratory Diseases, 1.6 billion cigarette packs were sold in Mexico between January and June 2016, almost 43 percent more than during the same period of 2015.

In 2003, the federal government began adopting measures to curb smoking based on World Health Organization recommendations, but a group of non-governmental organizations have reported that Mexico’s performance in respect of anti-smoking policies has been ‘disappointing’.