Raising the price of tobacco really allows smokers to drop out, whether they are French or Americans. This has been demonstrated in several studies, and in particular in a very recent American study which compares the impact of different laws on the number of smokers between different states.
There were many smokers last Saturday evening to complain about not having thought of buying a cartridge to anticipate the rise in the price of tobacco.
And for good reason: Thursday, March 1, the price of a packet of cigarettes increased by one euro, reaching an average of 7.90 euros. A significant increase which is based on the effectiveness of this anti-smoking measure.
Reduction of more than a third of sales
1.8 million French people quit smoking between 2002 and 2004 thanks to the gradual increase in the price of tobacco, according to Figaro figures, or a reduction of more than a third of sales. Young people would be the most sensitive to this “war on cigarettes”, initiated by Jacques Chirac, while 90% of adult smokers started to smoke before 18 years old.
In the USA, a recent studye from New York University, published in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research, has also just proved that the states which regularly increased the price of tobacco had much fewer smokers than the others.
For example, tobacco consumption is much higher in West Virginia (26.1%) than in Utah (10.7%), and more generally in the Southwestern States of the United States than in the United States. from the east.
Better yet, the study by Doctor Omar El-Shahawy also proves that the increase in the price of tobacco also lowers the number of consumers of electronic cigarettes, for example much less in Delaware (2.7%) than in the ‘Oklahoma (10.3%).
Priority targets
The only condition: the increase in the price of tobacco must be substantial to be truly effective. “For example, increasing the price by 10% on top of inflation lowers sales by 5%”, details in Figaro Catherine Hill, epidemiologist at the Institut Gustave-Roussy.
With this in mind, the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron has announced that he wants to raise the price of a packet of cigarettes to ten euros by 2020. Young people, the unemployed, craftsmen and workers, very affected by smoking, are the targets priorities of this anti-smoking policy.
In 2016, 34.5% of 15-75 year olds smoked tobacco in France, including 28.7% daily, according to a survey by Public Health France. And if these prevalences have been stable since 2010, after the increase observed between 2005 and 2010, smoking is still the cause of 73,000 deaths per year.
The majority of these taxes are returned to the Health Insurance in order to partially offset the expenses generated by tobacco-related illnesses. A “compensation” which remains insufficient in the opinion of specialists in the fight against smoking. The expenses are even more than twice as expensive as the revenue from tobacco taxes: to balance, you would need a pack of cigarettes at 20 euros!
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