This Wednesday, February 3, 2016, former President Nicolas Sarkozy visited farmers … and openly spoke out against the packet of plain tobacco, one of the flagship measures of the Health Law, which was entered in the Official Journal on January 27. As a reminder, this law supported by Minister Marisol Touraine provides for the introduction of cigarette packs all having the same shape, the same color, the same typography, without any logo from May 2016.
Except that Nicolas Sarkozy chose to place himself in the camp of pro-tobacco lobby : “If we accept the packet of neutral cigarettes, in six months we will offer you a bottle of neutral wine, and it will be the end of our appellations, it will be the end of our terroirs, it will be the end of defense of our know-how. Tomorrow you will have fundamentalists who will ask you for the neutral bottle. Then the neutral cheese. “
The obvious: tobacco kills
A controversial statement that has not gone unnoticed. Asked by our colleagues at France Info, the president of the French anti-tobacco control office, Bertrand Dautzenberg, considered that Nicolas Sarkozy’s remarks were “inappropriate and unacceptable”. “There is no tobacco terroir in France,” he insisted. For her part, Marisol Touraine denounced “mediocre and inappropriate” remarks.
But the most argued reaction came from Michel Cymes and Marina Carrère d’Encausse, the two hosts of the Health magazine on France 5. “Mr. Sarkozy, know, one, that tobacco kills, that alcohol kills only in case of excessive consumption, but that cheese do not kill. Second, that in France, tobacco cultivation represents only 200 hectares. You will agree, it is very strange to associate the notion of terroir with a deadly product. And thirdly, that it is to say the least hurtful for all the doctors or the actors of health to be called fundamentalists, when one defends questions of public health. “
To the unbelievers, we remind that each year, cigarettes kill 73,000 French people, that 30% of cancers are linked to tobacco, that smokers have about 10 to 15 years of life expectancy less and that it is not. the quantity of tobacco consumed that counts, but the duration of consumption: “small” smokers present as much risk as “heavy” smokers.
Discover our infographic: everything in a cigarette.
