HEALTH-FRANCE: Smoking Bills

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Oct 15 2003 (IPS) - Heavy smokers will need more cash and stronger resistance to health warnings to go on as before.

Starting Oct. 20 they will face a 20 percent tax increase on all tobacco products. Selling tobacco to anyone under age 18 will be forbidden. And from January, a further 20 percent tax hike will come into force, making French tobacco the most expensive in Europe after Britain and Norway.

After the two hikes, a typical packet of cigarettes will cost about six dollars in France, against four dollars in Germany, Italy, and Belgium, and three dollars in Spain and Luxembourg. By January next year, the price of cigarettes will have doubled from 2002.

Smokers also face a new campaign on the noxious effects of tobacco. For weeks now, cigarette packages have carried warnings in bold letters such as "Smoking Kills". Television channels show frequent clips of diseases brought on by smoking.

The new taxation on tobacco products is part of a government effort to raise revenues, but it is also a campaign to reduce lung cancer and other tobacco- related diseases.

"As part of our plan to fight cancer, we certainly will increase the price of tobacco once more during 2004, until the prices reach a level that induces smokers to give up tobacco," says health minister Jean-Francois Mattei.

And that hike will not be the last either. Taxes on cigarettes will be raised regularly to discourage smoking, he says.

After his re-election last year, President Jacques Chirac called the fight against cancer a big challenge of his new mandate. "Cancer is a major health problem in our country, and we have to fight it and beat it," he said.

Between 1950 and 1997, the mortality rate due to lung cancer rose threefold among men aged 35-54, and five times among men aged 55-74. According to official figures, 165 people die of tobacco-related diseases every day in France.

This is not the first big increase in taxation on cigarettes. Between 1984 and 1999, taxation on tobacco increased threefold. A law passed in 1991 banned advertising of tobacco. These measures led to a 20 percent decline in tobacco consumption, Mattei says.

But most smokers and traders say the new price increases will not lead to any further shrinking of consumption. Instead, they say such measures will encourage smuggling, as happened in Canada in the early 1990s after the government introduced heavy taxes on tobacco.

To begin with, French smokers have acquired new cases to insert cigarette packets into. Visible warnings do not deter many either. One in two adolescents continues to smoke despite the price increases and the health warnings, according to official estimates.

One in five French doctors smokes, against one in 20 in the United States.

Health experts say it costs 20 billion dollars a year to treat tobacco-related diseases in France. Revenue from taxation on tobacco amounted to a billion dollars last year.

This imbalance led a public health insurance service in Saint Nazaire, 450 km south-west of Paris, to launch unsuccessful legal action against tobacco producers in February 1999. "We wanted the law to recognize that tobacco consumption makes you dependent and provokes dangerous diseases, and we want to get back the money we spend in treating these diseases," said Pierre Rousseau, director of the local health service. The court rejected the demand last month.

Higher taxes on tobacco in France come amid a new global concern. Cigarettes kill more than three million people around the world every year – more than AIDS, car accidents, murders, suicides, alcohol and illegal drugs combined.

Half of all lifelong smokers will die of tobacco-related diseases, studies show. Half will die before they are 70. Smoking can harm not just the smoker but also family members and others who breathe "second-hand smoke".