Quitting by default

Changing the way tobacco is retailed would be a crucial step in achieving the New Zealand Government’s 2025 smoke-free goal, new research by the University of Otago suggests.
If the Government prevented new retail outlets from selling tobacco, while allowing existing retailers to continue selling tobacco until they closed or relocated, it could achieve a 50 percent reduction in tobacco outlets by 2032, the research, just published in the medical journal Tobacco Control, is said to have shown.
One of the study’s authors, co-director of the Cancer Society Social and Behavioural Research Unit at the university’s Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, Dr. Louise Marsh, said achieving this reduction would “likely help lower smoking prevalence and health inequities”.
“This approach would not achieve New Zealand’s endgame goal of reducing tobacco availability to minimal levels by 2025, nor the sector’s target of a 95 percent reduction in outlet density by 2022, but would nonetheless result in a significant advancement from the status quo,” she was quoted as saying in a piece posted on the university’s website.
Decreasing the number of outlets that stock tobacco would help reduce youth smoking initiation and enable smokers to quit ‘more easily’, Marsh and her colleague, Dr. Lindsay Robertson, formerly from the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, concluded.
The researchers examined the impact of a hypothetical policy that, from 2020, banned new retail outlets from selling tobacco. Under the policy, existing retailers would be allowed to continue selling tobacco until they closed their outlets or moved to a different location, when they could no longer sell from the new location.
The study used Stats NZ data on the number of tobacco outlets between 2006 and 2016 (supermarkets, convenience stores, service stations and liquor stores only), and the rate at which these stores closed or relocated.
Based on mean annual closure rates, the total number of tobacco outlets would decrease by 27 percent by 2025, 50 percent by 2032 and 84 percent by 2050.