Tobacco-related illness is one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced. Approximately 1 person dies from a tobacco-related disease every 6 seconds, equivalent to around 6 million people a year. The bad news is that this number is foreseen to rise to more than 8 million people a year by 2030, unless strong measures are taken to control the epidemic.
A new "WHO Report on the global tobacco epidemic 2015", gives advice on how to fight back tobacco through taxes. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), increasing tobacco taxes is a proven measure to reduce tobacco consumption. For instance, in France the raise on tobacco taxation that began in the 1990s led to a threefold increase in the inflation-adjusted price of cigarettes, and, by 2005, to a halving of cigarette consumption from around six cigarettes per adult per day to three cigarettes per day. Lung cancer rates in France among men aged 35–44 years fell from 1999 onwards.
Strategies to support the implementation of demand reduction measures contained within the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), such as the “MPOWER” package, have helped save millions of lives in the past decade. MPOWER was established in 2008 to promote government action on 6 tobacco control strategies – 1 for each letter of the MPOWER acronym – to stamp out the tobacco epidemic, namely to:
- Monitor tobacco use and prevention policies;
- Protect people from tobacco smoke;
- Offer help to quit tobacco use;
- Warn people about the dangers of tobacco;
- Enforce bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship; and
- Raise taxes on tobacco.
Main findings of the report include the fact that raising taxes is the least implemented MPOWER measure in terms of population coverage, and the one that has seen the less improvement in terms of government action since 2008. However, by 2014, 11 countries had raised taxes so that they represent more than 75% of the retail price of a packet of cigarettes, joining the 22 countries that had similarly high taxes in place in 2008.
Tobacco taxation could also be a key source of funding for implementing the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals.