For 5 years, the Greeks have given up smoking en masse. This is shown by a study carried out at European level by The European Health Interview Survey and relayed by The Guardian. Greece has come a long way in terms of tobacco control as a No Smoking in public places had been announced in 2002 (before France) but had never been respected. The economic crisis that affected Greece in 2009 has it something to do with this sudden drop in consumption?
Mainly financial reasons
This decline is due to the fact that far fewer young people start to smoke and older people stop or reduce their use. Thus, 35.1 billion cigarettes were smoked in 2007 and only 17.9 billion in 2016. Since the economic crisis, internships and seminars have multiplied for help smokers quit. According to sociologist Aliki Mouriki, interviewed by The Guardian, “people don’t give up so much for health reasons, but mostly for reasons of financial reasons“.
Panagiotis Behrakis, who heads the Joint Action Force on Tobacco Control in Europe, announced that the number of smokers had fallen by 9.6% in Greece in the past 5 years. In the 2012 survey, they were 36.7% regular and occasional smokers. In 2017, they were only 27.1%. Even if this figure remains very high compared to other European countries (20% in France, 15% in Germany, 17% in Italy …), Panagiotis Behrakis thinks that “the problem is solved” and that “it is not ‘is only a matter of time’. Indeed, minus 2 percentage points per year, in the space of 5 years, is for him a record figure.
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