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Brazil’s illicit cigarette trade surveillance is a model to follow
Last week, Brazil released the results of the 2019 National Health Survey. One very encouraging piece of news that the survey brought is that the prevalence of tobacco product use dropped below 13%. These levels of tobacco use have not been seen in Brazil since nearly half a century and the pace of prevalence decline…
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Measuring Illicit Trade Accurately is Key to Successful Tobacco Control
As we continue to emphasize at the Tobacco Atlas, the supposed threat of illicit trade in tobacco products continues to be an obstacle to tobacco control generally and improved (i.e., increased!) tobacco excise taxation specifically. One of the tactics that the tobacco industry uses to great success is to provide unsubstantiated overestimates of illicit trade…
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Estimating illicit trade in tobacco products just got more simple
It is always challenging to know the exact size of the illicit cigarette trade. To start, the covert nature of the problem makes it difficult to measure. Governments often obtain information about the scope of illicit trade from their customs agencies. Those agencies, however, generally do not have a full overview of the problem, as…
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Blowing the Lid Off of Tobacco and Heart Health: A WHO Tobacco and Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) Knowledge Summary
Tobacco use and second-hand smoke exposure are responsible for 1.9 million avoidable deaths from coronary heart disease, or CHD, every year. That is approximately 21% of total CHD deaths. And yet, in many countries, the links between tobacco use and heart disease remain poorly understood or largely ignored. Findings from the Global Adult Tobacco Survey…
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Price elasticity or affordability elasticity? A puzzle solved for practitioners of tobacco taxation
Price elasticity measures the sensitivity of consumers to changes in real prices, holding real income constant, while affordability elasticity measures the sensitivity of consumers to price changes adjusted for inflation and income changes. The existing scientific literature on tobacco demand abounds in both price and affordability elasticity estimates, without providing a clear explanation of the…
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Research shows that Pakistan is more than ready for a significant tobacco excise tax increase
One in five adults in Pakistan use tobacco on a regular basis. This leads to serious consequences for the country’s public health and its economy: just over 160,000 deaths and an economic loss of 143,208 million rupees occur every year due to tobacco-related illnesses. In recent years, Pakistan has taken important steps towards protecting people…
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Bans on Flavored Cigarettes Should Be Universally Embraced — And Include Menthol
In places where menthol has been included in flavor bans, tobacco companies have exploited loopholes to get around the harshest effects of the policies on their sales. For example, after the European Union announced its ban on flavored cigarettes, tobacco companies started producing peppermint-scented cardboard strips to place inside a pack of cigarettes or bag…
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What does the experimental evidence say about whether e-cigarettes help people quit smoking?
More than half of U.S. smokers attempt to quit each year. More and more, these quit attempts have involved the use of electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), such as e-cigarettes. Unlike pharmaceutical nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) products, ENDS are not approved by any medicines regulator around the world as smoking cessation devices. Many types of…
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Why Increasing Tobacco Taxes in El Salvador is an Excellent Idea
Currently, about 430,000 people smoke in El Salvador, roughly half of them will die from tobacco consumption. A significant proportion of young Salvadorans (one in ten) consume tobacco, which typically translates into higher healthcare costs and, for many, illnesses that will disable them and / or lead to death. Every year, about 1,600 people die…
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Tobacco 21 Policies: Raising the Minimum Age of Sale of Tobacco to Curb Youth Smoking
In the U.S., such policies started at the local level. Beginning with Needham, Massachusetts, in 2003, individual localities and states passed laws at different times, initially creating a patchwork of policies that was followed by a national law passed in December 2019. Singapore, on the other hand, is taking a phased approach by raising the…