Tag: Japan

Japanese success

South Korea appears to offer even greater potential for lowering the overall smoking rate than Japan. Smoking is predominantly a male habit in South Korea, and although prevalence has slowly fallen over the past decades, it is still high compared with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average of 23 percent. According to statista.com, 40.6 percent of male adults in South Korea smoked in 2018 whereas the figure for female smokers was 6 percent according to the most recent available data, from 2017. In total, the average smoking prevalence stood at 21.7 percent in 2018, down from 26.1 percent 10 years earlier, according to a study by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Until it became a testing ground for HTPs, Japan had similar figures. The share of men smoking decreased from 50 percent in 2001 to around 25 percent in 2018, with about 10 percent of Japanese women smoking, according to japan-guide.com. While sluggish at first, the decline accelerated spectacularly after the nationwide introduction of HTPs in late 2015. A study published in May 2020 on behalf of the Coalition of Asia-Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates (CAPHRA) based on data from the Tobacco Institute of Japan and PMI confirmed that the remarkable reduction in combustible cigarette sales was triggered by the entry of HTPs.

David Sweanor, a professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Ottawa and one of the study’s authors, calls Japan a success story in tobacco harm reduction. The Japanese experience, he says, proves how consumers’ interest and the regulatory environment shape markets. While Japanese regulations precluded alternatives to combustible cigarettes, such as nicotine vapor products, HTPs generated huge interest among smokers in Japan.

“As more [smokers] adopted the alternative, they helped speed switching by others,” says Sweanor. “I think this gives us an indication of just how much more rapidly countries could reduce cigarette use if there were many different low-risk alternatives available and policies and public education campaigns facilitated a widespread move away from [combustible] cigarettes. We have seen the most rapid decline in cigarette sales ever witnessed in a major market. A third of the cigarette market was gone in a remarkably short period of time, and this was accomplished with a noncoercive measure. People who smoke cigarettes were simply provided with a viable alternative.”

Sweanor insists there now is evidence that a range of low-risk products could help rapidly achieve the smoking rate targets of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) sustainable development goals. “To seek to ban or limit access to such products protects the cigarette industry rather than public health,” he says.

RRPs are the most disruptive influence on smoking in decades, according to CAPHRA Executive Director Nancy Loucas. In northern Asia, HTPs are the most popular form of safer nicotine products, she says. “So it is very disheartening that countries in Asia Pacific, like Korea and the Philippines, are looking to either ban and/or reduce access and choice of all forms of tobacco harm-reduced products for their smoking citizens.”