This year World No Tobacco Day highlights the tobacco industry’s systematic and sustained efforts to hook a new generation of users. With this campaign, the World Health Organization intends to expose the tobacco industry tactics that targets adolescents and young people, and the risk of using tobacco in the context of COVID-19.
Creating awareness about the aggressive efforts of the tobacco industry to lure adolescents and young people to use their addictive and dangerous products is urgent. The tobacco industry continues to aggressively market new devices and tobacco products in a variety of flavours, including “cotton candy” and “Gummy Bear” – and in very alluring shapes and colours that are attractive to children and young people.
The tobacco industry won’t stop and will reinvent the way of doing business to make profits at the cost of people’s lives, especially young lives. A new study published in The Lancet this week, shows that compared with never-smokers, those smokers who had started smoking before age 15, and specially before age 10 had the highest all-cause mortality rate ratio. [1]
One of the authors involved in the study asserted that worldwide, about 100 million smokers started before the age of 15 and more than half will be killed by tobacco unless they stop.[2]
Parties can protect their new generations applying the directives of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, particularly enacting or strengthening a total ban on tobacco advertisement, promotion and sponsorship, including cross-border advertisement and further regulating traditional and novel tobacco products and their components.
Adolescents and young people can be empowered to protect themselves if they understand the real intentions of an industry that wants to hook them on an addictive product just to increase and secure its profits despite the public health consequences.
Message for World No Tobacco Day 2020 by Dr Adriana Blanco Marquizo, Head of the Convention Secretariat
1. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(20)30221-7/fulltext
2. https://www.ndph.ox.ac.uk/news/starting-to-smoke-in-childhood-is-much-more-dangerous-than-starting-later