Increasing Tobacco Taxes May Be Best Option to Reduce Smoking

Two leading tobacco control experts are urging countries to significantly reduce smoking by boosting tobacco taxes, CTV News reports.

Experts believe that increasing tobacco taxes is the best and most effective way of reaching the global goal of cutting the prevalence of smoking by one-third by 2025. An increase in tobacco taxes will double the cost of the product especially in developing countries where prices are currently low and the number of smokers is growing rapidly. The experts also claim that this drastic approach is what made it possible for other countries like Canada and France to reduce their smoking populations.

Dr. Prabhat Jha, a public health professor at the University of Toronto and Richard Peto, a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at Oxford University listed down all possible arguments in a review article. This article was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The two experts say that if current smoking patterns are not addressed, approximately one billion people will die from tobacco-related causes this century and most of them will be coming from middle to low-income countries.

Doubling the cost of cigarettes will hopefully minimize tobacco users and may prevent others to even start using it. "There are no magic bullets in public health. But tobacco taxes are as close to a silver bullet as you can think of," said Jha, who is also affiliated with Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital. "Higher taxes are the single best way to get people to quit smoking. Quitting seriously would avoid something like 200 million premature deaths this century."

"Without large price increases, a reduction in smoking by a third would be difficult to achieve. The reason smoking is going up in poor countries is because cigarettes are cheap. Particularly when incomes have grown, people are able to buy cigarettes at a lower price relative to their income," he added.