Cigarettes and Tobacco News

Jun 5, 2006 -- World No Tobacco Day makes no difference for Richard Li as he stands outside his Beijing office building smoking one of his daily 20 cigarettes. Tobacco may kill him, but he cannot live without it.

“I started smoking when I was 22 and still at university, because everyone else was doing it,” said Li, now a 34-year-old IT executive. “I know it’s bad for my health. But I can’t quit and I won’t quit, because there’s so much pressure at work.”

Young and well-educated city dwellers like Li are among the prime movers in bringing the developed world’s number one preventable cause of death to China. The Asian nation’s addiction to tobacco has fallen inevitably under the global spotlight during Wednesday’s World Health Organization-mandated No Tobacco Day.

China is the world’s biggest producer of tobacco. It sells 1.6 trillion cigarettes a year, according to China’s health ministry. If placed end to end, they would reach to the moon and back 150 times. There are 350 million smokers in China — nearly one-third of the world’s total — and chances are that a large number of China’s remaining one billion are passive smokers. Stand on a street corner in any Chinese city, or sit down in a restaurant or a waiting room, and the nostrils fill with smoke from Great Wall and Panda cigarettes, fake Camels and Marlboros. The human cost is immense. More than one million people in China die of smoking-related diseases every year and the number will rise to two million by 2020, the health ministry said. Many of the Chinese who will be filling the cancer wards in a decade and a half are picking up the habit right now.

A staggering 100 million Chinese smokers are under the age of 18, reflecting a trend for tobacco to reach an ever-younger market segment, according to the health ministry. Nineteen is the average age when people start smoking in China, five years earlier than the average starting age in 1997.

Hurdle champion Liu Xiang, whose gold medal at the Athens Olympics made him a national hero, was notoriously hired as a celebrity spokesman for Baisha Corp., a major local cigarette maker. Other types of role models are not much use either. According to the China Daily, more than half of all male teachers and doctors are smokers.

The pressure on the already overburdened public health system in just a few years’ time could be enormous, and the government knows it. China is considering banning smoking in certain public venues such as kindergartens and schools, state media reported this week. China has also promised a “smoke-free” Olympics in 2008, meaning no tobacco will be allowed in certain hospitals, on buses and trains, and in public buildings, according to the health ministry.

Bans and more bans may be a natural reaction for many Chinese bureaucrats, but there are other possible approaches, some experts said. “The key problem is that public information on the harmful effects of tobacco is insufficient,” said Qiao Youlin, a cancer expert at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.

However, government campaigns to curb smoking through gentle persuasion are met with silent protests or even rare acts of vandalism. “No Smoking” signs are ripped off the walls of public toilets, while taxi drivers frequently light up in happy disregard of their own anti-tobacco stickers. afp