Smoking poleaxed

Poles, who in the 1990s smoked 100 billion cigarettes a year, now smoke only 40 billion annually, according to a story by Paweł Kononczukthe for Polskie Radio citing the World Health Organization’s Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic 2017.

In addition, the proportion of smokers within Poland’s population has dropped from 42 percent in the 1980s to 24 percent in 2015.

The results of the WHO study were presented at an event in Warsaw on Wednesday.

Talking at the event, the physician, professor Witold Zatoński, said Poland, along with other EU states, was at the forefront of introducing policies aimed at curbing tobacco consumption.

He said that the drop might have been largely attributed to a 1995 law on “the protection of health against the effects of tobacco consumption, then hailed by the WHO as the best such legal act in the world”.

The deputy health Minister Zbigniew Król was quoted as saying that his ministry wanted “cigarettes to be expensive, unappealing and hard to access”.

Meanwhile, the Eurostat statistics agency said in May that Poland remained among the countries with the highest rate of deaths from smoking-related lung cancer in the EU.