Source: Radio New Zealand
“If you match a tobacco cigarette in a joint in terms of the same size and smoked in the same way, cannabis results in five times higher levels of carbon monoxide” – physician and academic Richard Beasley. Elsa Olofsson
New Zealand was once a world leader in getting people to give up cigarettes, but we seem to have pulled up the brakes
In 34 days we hit the deadline for our world-leading ambitions to get our smoking rate down to less than five percent of the population.
To reach that Smokefree 2025 target we need 120,000 people to quit smoking pretty much immediately.
“That’s about 63,000 Māori, 21,000 Pasifika, 35,000 Europeans needed to quit,” says Chris Bullen, Auckland University public health professor and a leading researcher in the smokefree Aotearoa sector.
We’re not going to make it, but have we failed?
It depends on who you are, says Bullen.
“It’s come down and spectacularly so for certain populations,” he says.
Pākehā women living in high income suburbs have already reached the goal – that demographic is well below five percent.
For Māori it is three times the five percent target, Pasifika smokers are double the desired number.
Should we aim for Smokefree 2030?
Today, The Detail looks at why we missed the goal, the impact of this government’s removal of smokefree protections introduced by the previous Labour government under the Smokefree Action Plan, and what is next in the tobacco control battle.
When Smokefree 2025 was launched around 2011/2012 after a recommendation from the Māori Affairs Selection Committee, around 16.4 percent of adult New Zealanders smoked.
The latest figures from the annual NZ Health Survey show that figure is now 6.8 percent, similar to the previous year but down from 11.9 percent in 2019/20.
Some say we should celebrate what we’ve achieved, and they rubbish the latest rankings in the Global Tobacco Industry Interference Index, which has seen us plummet from second to 53rd place.
But dig into the numbers and they reveal deep inequities with Māori smoking rates at 15 percent and Pasifika at 10.3 percent.
“It’s an absolute failure and I think the present government’s been particularly bad in doing it,” says Anaru Waa, associate professor at Otago University based in Wellington. His research focuses on how we can eliminate tobacco-related harm among whānau Māori.
He’d like to see our Smokefree aim shifted out to 2030, and for it to be not just smoke-free but nicotine-free, because of all the new nicotine products on the market.
Bullen says the launch of Smokefree 2025 around 13 years ago was a breakthrough.
“It was an important lesson for me was that setting goals and targets can be very powerful,” says Bullen. “But it was also a lesson in that it seemed so far away, that for politicians on a three-year electoral cycle it was somebody else’s issue to grapple with.”
“So I guess they thought they’d just get a free ride because smoking was going out of fashion and by 2025 it would be a thing of the past. Of course it’s not.”
Bullen says there’s been cross party support for the idea and ongoing tobacco tax increases and regulations such as smokefree cars and indoor spaces all add up to incremental changes.
“But it was not until Ayesha Verrell (former Labour Health Minister) took up the cause and said 2025 is almost upon us, we need to do something. And that’s where the action plan was promoted and became law, very briefly, until it was repealed when the coalition government took power.”
Labour’s Smokefree 2025 Action Plan included three key measures; banning the sale of cigarettes to anyone born after 2009, slashing the number of tobacco retailers and cutting 95 percent of the nicotine from cigarettes.
But before the measures came into force the legislation supporting them was repealed by the Coalition Government.
Bullen says the policy was supported by the majority of New Zealanders in polling and by the vast majority of healthcare professionals. The repeal mobilised protestors with placards to the streets.
He says the repeal cannot entirely be blamed for the failure to hit the Smokefree target across the population but it sent a subtle message to smokers, “to say, you know our foot’s gone off the accelerator pedal, maybe it’s not so bad”.
The removal of targets for GPs and hospitals to give brief advice and support to people to quit smoking, also had an impact.
“Different governments do these things for various other reasons but that has had a measurable decline in the number of referrals coming to smoking cessation services from GPs.
“The whole system has to work together and I don’t think we’ve had a co ordinated, focussed system that’s really messaged loudly that we have got a goal as a nation and it’s something we can do collectively to support each other to get to that goal. That voice hasn’t been shouted loudly enough.”
The associate health minister Casey Costello has defended the government’s policies and called the Smokefree target ‘ambitious’. She has pointed to the latest figures that show that smoking among young people is below 3.2 percent as the best news.
“That’s exactly what we wanted our young people to see. We wanted our young people not to start,” she has said.
But Anaru Waa says New Zealand’s policies are not keeping up with the new products that are constantly being developed by the tobacco industry designed to hook young people.
“Nicotine drinks, nicotine gummy bears, you name it, just shove nicotine in it and you’ve got a hooked population.
“These aren’t nicotine replacement therapies with low nicotine ….. nicotine is a very highly addictive drug and the industries are awfully good at making it palatable and easy to get addicted to very quickly, then you tend to have the addiction for life.”
He says to achieve the Smokefree goal the measures that were scrapped by this government need to be returned but he also wants strict policies to extend further to products including vapes, with the ultimate aim of shutting out the tobacco industry.
“For some people who can’t quit it (vaping) might be an alternative but we also know that most of the people taking up vapes are youth and young adults and a lot of them have never smoked at all.
“These are the new generation of people using nicotine products and I’m thinking in 20 or 30 years time they’ll wonder why they were thrown under the bus at a time we could have prevented that.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand