Category: Regulation

  • Crowded market

    Crowded market

    The Solomon Islands, population about 600,000, is perhaps going to see the establishment of a third tobacco company, according to a story in The Solomon Star.

    The country’s two existing companies are the Solomon Islands Tobacco Company Ltd. and Solomon Sun Cigarette Company.

    The director of Non-Communicable Diseases Dr. Geoff Kenilorea reportedly told the Star that a third tobacco company was eying the local market. “I heard from customs that an overseas tobacco firm has their building materials offloaded at the port’s wharf,” Kenilorea was quoted as saying.

    “But we haven’t received an application from them as yet,” he said, before adding that the name of the company was not known.

    “…the Tobacco Control Act 2010 does not restrict the number of tobacco companies operating here,” he said.

    “So, if a new tobacco company submits its application and meets all the requirements under the Act, they can open their factory here.”

    However, Kenilorea said the government was currently working on ways to control or limit the number of tobacco companies allowed to operate in the country, though it was up to the Ministry of Health to decide whether two was already more than enough.

    “In actual fact, the best-case scenario would be if we did not have any company manufacturing locally at all.

    “What we can do at this time now is to ensure that the Tobacco Control Act 2010 is fully implemented so that our people will be more productive, healthier and thus happier,” he said.

  • Two years for vaping

    Two years for vaping

    Those caught smoking or vaping in parks in the Malaysian state of Selangor face a maximum fine of RM10,000 or up to two years’ imprisonment, according to a story in The Star.

    The punishments will be meted out under the Control of Tobacco Product (Amendment) Regulations 2017, which came into force yesterday.

    Selangor Health director Datuk Dr. Zailan Adnan said that enforcement would be carried out in stages.

    “To gazette a park as a non-smoking area is a separate process, we need to know how big the park is and where the boundaries are,” Zailan said.

    “We also need to start soft enforcement, to educate and inform the public.”

    Besides parks, other gazetted non-smoking zones include shopping complexes, air-conditioned premises, government premises, hospitals and gas filling stations.

    The bans are said to be in line with Malaysia’s aim to be a smoke-free nation by 2045.

    Meanwhile, the Star said that, in the state of Perak, ‘those who light up at public and state parks face a RM5,000 fine’.

    The Perak Health Committee chairman Datuk Dr. Mah Hang Soon said the ban on smoking would be enforced in part with spot checks, because ‘the element of surprise was key in deterring smokers from puffing away with no regard for the new law’.

  • China’s slow ‘progress’

    China’s slow ‘progress’

    Despite signing a World Health Organization treaty on tobacco control more than a decade ago, China is experiencing one million deaths a year from smoking, according to a report published yesterday by the University of Waterloo’s International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (ITC) and China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP).

    The ITC-China CDCP report presents the results of a 10-year longitudinal study of 8,000 smokers and 2,000 non-smokers in five major Chinese cities and five rural areas. It found, in part, that more than half of the country’s 316 smokers had no intention of quitting.

    “The ITC survey shows clearly that although China has made some progress in tobacco control, their progress on combatting the number one cause of preventable death, cigarettes, has been slow,” said Geoffrey Fong, founder of the 28-country ITC Project and professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo. “For 10 years, China has not taken actions to reduce smoking that have been shown to work well in many other countries.”

    In addition to finding high rates of smoking and low quitting intentions, the study found also that though awareness of the harm caused by cigarettes to smokers had increased during the past decade, it was still the lowest of any country surveyed by the ITC Project.

    According to the survey, only 61 percent of Chinese smokers were aware that smoking could cause heart disease, the lowest level of awareness of any ITC country. The survey found too that second-hand smoke was present in 62 percent of workplaces and 73 percent of homes in China, the highest levels of 20 ITC countries.

    “Smoking is the most important cause of chronic, non-communicable diseases, which account for nearly 90 percent of deaths in China,” said Yuan Jiang, the director of the Tobacco Control Office of the Chinese CDCP. “It is critically important for China to implement a national smoke-free law, pictorial health warnings on cigarette packages, and a complete ban on all forms of tobacco advertising.”

    The report includes recommendations for strengthening tobacco control efforts, including a substantial increase in cigarette taxes. ITC data was said to show that cigarettes were more affordable in China than in any other ITC country.

    “It’s now time for policymakers in China to build on the steps it has taken and to move decisively to reverse the tobacco epidemic,” said Bernhard Schwartländer, the WHO representative in China. “Findings from the ITC-China CDC[P] report present a compelling case that more action needs to be taken in China in the interest of public health.”

    The ITC-China CDCP executive summary report is at: www.itcproject.org.

  • Tobacco, marijuana go head-to-head

    Tobacco, marijuana go head-to-head

    Canada’s federal Health Minister is said to have demonstrated a ‘disturbing degree of incoherence in her recent approach to regulating tobacco and marijuana’.

    Imperial Tobacco Canada yesterday called on the minister, Jane Philpott, to use the opportunity presented by World No Tobacco Day, to explain her approach.

    In a press note issued through PRNewswire, the company said that the minister had proposed ‘plain and standardized packaging’ for tobacco products, despite cigarette packages already having a 75 percent health warning and being hidden from public view at point of sale.

    At the same time, she had said that all that was required for marijuana was a restriction on packaging or labelling to ensure that product packaging was not appealing to young persons.

    “Public explanation is needed as both marijuana and tobacco are substances with known health risks,” said Eric Gagnon, Imperial’s head of corporate and external affairs. “This suggests that marijuana and tobacco should face a similar regulatory framework, but the minister appears to be headed in the opposite direction, giving far more leniency to the marijuana industry.”

    The press note said that the youth usage rate for marijuana was higher than that for tobacco. And the minister had acknowledged that Canadian youth had the highest rate of marijuana use in the world at a time when tobacco use and youth smoking were at an all-time low.

    “There is clear policy incoherence, which is even more apparent considering the minister claims the goal with both marijuana and tobacco legislation is to protect youth,” said Gagnon. “How can two legislative frameworks, for products that both carry known health risks, have the same stated goal yet vastly different approaches?”

    Imperial said that the federal government had gone to great lengths to claim its goal was to eliminate the black market for marijuana and had suggested that taxes on marijuana would be kept low to allow competition with the illegal market. Yet, governments across Canada had and continued to tax cigarettes to an extent that had contributed to the creation of an illegal trade that now accounted for more than 20 percent of the tobacco market.

    “If the Minister truly believes her policy approach to marijuana is effective, then surely it can be applied to tobacco,” said Gagnon. “Instead, parliament is about to have the spectacle of the minister arguing on one day that branding on tobacco packaging lures youth to smoking and should be banned, while on the next day suggesting that branding should be allowed for marijuana to help compete against black market [products].”

    Imperial said that today, World No Tobacco Day, provided an opportunity for the minister to demonstrate that she was serious about the health of Canadians.

    But focusing on excessive and ineffective measures that made it easier for illegal traffickers to counterfeit licit tobacco products was not the way to demonstrate that commitment.

    The minister and her department officials needed to acknowledge the importance of alternative products – such as heated tobacco or vaping products – by prioritizing the introduction of clear regulations on these products, and making them known and available to adult consumers, as soon as possible.

  • EU tobacco control poor

    EU tobacco control poor

    EU countries are not doing enough to implement tobacco control policies, according to the Irish MEP Nessa Childers.

    Writing in The Parliament magazine, Childers said the latest available results of the tobacco control scale for 2016, in which Luk Joossens and Martin Raw had ranked 35 European countries on the basis of tobacco-control-policy implementation, had shown that the majority had received a negative mark. This was also the case in respect of EU member states only, ‘albeit by a narrower margin’.

    In the face of ‘scandal-prone lobby onslaughts and court challenges to tobacco advertising legislation and the tobacco products directive’, policy and implementation of measures on the ground remained inadequate, as the tobacco control scale rankings indicated.

    ‘In general terms, inadequacies in implementation of the provisions that survived the tobacco industry’s lobby onslaught, at national and European level, stem from paltry budget allocations to tobacco control policy,’ Childers said. ‘These jar with the overall costs and burden of this epidemic to society.

    ‘EU countries spend less than one euro per capita annually on tobacco control, with some countries even making cuts.’

    Later in her piece, Childers said that the EU Commission deserved praise for its role in securing EU ratification of the protocol to eliminate the illegal trade in tobacco products.

    ‘Indeed, and in line with the tobacco products directive, the fight against smuggling and counterfeiting is a serious matter,’ she said. ‘It must remain in the hands of adequately resourced public bodies, in control of tracking and tracing. It should not subcontract poachers for game-keeping.

    ‘We need to devote greater resources to enforcing tobacco control, expanding the use of plain packaging, steeper taxation, display bans, and proper respect for article 5.3 of the framework convention on tobacco control to shut big tobacco out of public health policymaking.’

    Childers’ piece is at: https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/articles/opinion/tobacco-epidemic-weighing-heavily-europe?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Parliament%20Magazine%20Round-Up&utm_content=Daily%20Parliament%20Magazine%20Round-Up+CID_41fa2833e488946457e60f5ec3d5bb77&utm_source=Email%20newsletters&utm_term=Tobacco%20epidemic%20weighing%20heavily%20on%20Europe

  • Retailers call for restraint

    Retailers call for restraint

    The Sri Lanka Tobacco Retailers’ Association has urged the government to act with restraint when taxing and regulating tobacco products, according to a story in The Daily News.

    Representatives of the association last week met the newly-appointed Finance Minister, Mangala Samaraweera, to highlight several issues facing tobacco traders.

    They said that the association’s membership of more than 100,000 had been adversely affected by the government’s tax hike on tobacco products in October.

    The tax hike had impacted livelihoods severely because it had affected sales of other products that were normally bought by tobacco consumers entering their shops.

    Many tobacco consumers had switched to illicit products so no longer entered their shops.

    The representatives asked the minister to maintain the prices of licit tobacco products at reasonable levels, not implement a proposed ban on single-stick sales, and not introduce regulations that would affect their business and livelihoods in a drastic manner.

    They said that tobacco traders had conducted their businesses in an ethical manner, respecting the laws and regulations applying to the tobacco trade.

  • Illegal trade targeted

    Illegal trade targeted

    The Taiwan government’s efforts to crack down on tobacco smuggling have borne fruit, resulting in the seizure of more than six million packs of contraband cigarettes during the past six months, according to a story in The Taipei Times quoting the Minister of Finance, Sheu Yu-jer.

    Since October 20, the Ministry of Finance, in co-operation with other government agencies, had adopted tougher measures to combat cigarette and tobacco smuggling, Sheu said.

    These measures had been put in place ahead of the implementation of legislation raising the health surcharge on cigarettes from NT$10 (US$0.33) per pack to NT$20 per pack as of June 12, a move that Sheu conceded might spur smuggling.

    About 6.22 million packs of smuggled cigarettes had been confiscated during the six-month period, he said.

    And during the first half of this month, about one million packs had been seized.

    The government has cracked down on suspicious practices, such as local fishermen having their boats registered as foreign vessels, a National Treasury Administration official said.

    In addition, it had drafted an amendment that would expand the range of smuggling inspections from within 12 nautical miles to 24 nautical miles (22.2km to 44.4km) of the coast of Taiwan, the official said.

    The proposal is still to be submitted to the cabinet for approval.

    The ministry urged the public to report counterfeit tobacco and alcohol products, adding that informants would be given a cash reward of up to NT$4.8 million.

  • Failing to enforce bans

    Failing to enforce bans

    Greece is failing to enforce its tobacco smoking bans despite apparent public support for the legislation, according to a Kathimerini story quoting the Hellenic Thoracic Society (HTS).

    The society yesterday appealed to the government to crack down on violations of the ban.

    Speaking at an event ahead of World No Tobacco Day on May 31, the HTS president, Michalis Toumpis, said the number of smokers in Greece seemed to be declining steadily. Eurostat’s most recent study had put regular tobacco users at 27.3 percent.

    Despite this decline, however, seven in 10 Greeks had told the EU’s statistics agency that they had been regularly exposed to other people’s tobacco smoke when visiting bars, restaurants and cafes – where smoking was supposed to be prohibited.

    “That 74 percent of non-smokers are angry about the situation, which means that the population is ready to accept the enforcement of the measures,” said Toumpis.

    Toumpis hailed the fact that 75 percent of the retail price of Greek-market tobacco products went toward taxes. Quite a few people came to smoking cessation clinics because they couldn’t afford to keep up the habit.

    Greece has about 50 such clinics, which have provided treatment and support to more than 300,000 smokers since they first opened in 2000.

    Greece was one of the first nations to sign up for the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which entered into force in 2005.

  • No smoking day in Cuba

    No smoking day in Cuba

    Cuba plans to mark World No Tobacco Day on May 31 by updating its existing regulations on the control of smoking in public places, according to a story in Prensa Latina.

    The head of the Department of School Health at the Ministry of Education, Yanira Gómez, said during a press conference held in Havana that Cuba had had in place since 1974 a regulation prohibiting tobacco smoking in institutions and state entities, including schools.

    The regulation had been designed to be effective, taking into account the particularities of the educational system.

    But it was now necessary to update the regulation by promoting new initiatives.

    The story did not indicate what changes might be made to the smoking regulations.

    But it said that this year’s campaign would aim ‘to mobilize the main social actors, as well as adolescent and young children, in the fight against exposure to tobacco smoke and in terms of sustainable development’.

  • Huge illegal trade in Russia

    Huge illegal trade in Russia

    About 35-40 percent of tobacco products sold on the Russian market are illegally produced, the Russian business ombudsman Boris Titov said in an annual report to the Russian president.

    The report was the subject of a story in Russia Beyond The Headlines quoting TASS.

    According to the most cautious estimates, the share of illicit products had already reached 35-40 percent, which had dealt a serious blow to the budget of the Russian Federation, the report said.

    The report expressed concern also about the ‘quality’ of the illicit products.

    The business ombudsman suggested creating a unified state mechanism to control the tobacco market, similar to the Unified State Automatic Information System (EGAIS) for alcohol products, developed by the Department for the State Regulation of the Economy and the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade.

    This computerized system gathers information about the use of raw materials, such as ethyl alcohol and other related products, as well as production volumes and left-over raw materials.

    Under the Russian law, all manufacturers, wholesalers and importers must register with EGAIS.

    The Russian Finance Ministry said earlier that legislation enabling a similar control mechanism on the tobacco market was to be passed during the parliament’s spring session.

    The government is said to be discussing various projects aimed at enhancing state control of the tobacco industry at all stages of its manufacturing and trade.