The new Minister of Health, Mónica García, is keen to focus the attention on limiting tobacco consumption among its strategies for this legislature.
Tobacco addiction represents the world’s leading cause of deaths and preventable morbidity today. Along these lines, the health official announced last week that she intends to resume the 2021-2025 anti-smoking plan, also opening the doors to expanding smoke-free spaces to areas such as terraces. Some strategies that had been parked for some time, and even withdrawn in some areas after they were implemented to reduce the spread of Covid.
Along these lines, the draft of the Comprehensive Plan for the Prevention and Control of Smoking, drafted at the time of Salvador Illa, proposed measures such as prohibiting smoking in certain spaces, regulating new forms of smoking and imposing more taxes on packs. Initiatives that seem to be getting the green light in the near future. “We cannot turn our backs on the only measure that can provide more years and quality of life to the population and reduce smoking,” García remarked about the idea of delving into the national anti-smoking strategy.
The minister herself has committed to “promote” all public policies that can be made in line with reducing smoking in the country, always with the help of experts. In this way, Health will deepen the current national strategy against tobacco, hand in hand with the General Directorate of Public Health and the National Committee for the Prevention of Smoking (CNPT). The objective that the department has set is to ensure that future generations be “tobacco-free” people.
In this sense, the CNPT itself had urged during the pre-electoral period of the last 23-J elections that the resulting Government implement the Comprehensive Smoking Plan during the first 100 days of its mandate. A request that, based on the words conveyed by Mónica García, seems closer to becoming a reality by the Ministry of Health, as well as can be expanded to “any addiction that affects new generations.”
Another action that the ministry could carry out is the increase in the price of tobacco, which for the associations is one of the most effective measures to fight against this addiction. The price of a pack has barely changed in the last ten years, rising by just under one euro. “To think that in recent years the price of tobacco has not changed is to deduce that the interest in reducing consumption is not commensurate with the health problems it generates,” laments the president of the National Committee for the Prevention of Smoking (CNPT), Dr. Francisco Pascual.
According to WHO data, a 33% price increase has a cost 15 times less than other measures achieving the same health benefit, and that a 10% price increase would allow consumption to be reduced by 4% in high-income countries and 5% in low- and middle-income countries.
In this way, it is expected that the beginning of the new year will serve as a starting point for the Ministry of Mónica García to take new steps to formalise the announced anti-smoking plan, which could finally bring the expansion of smoke-free spaces to all of Spain. the terraces, the increase in taxes against tobacco and the adjustment in the regulations on vapers and electronic cigarettes. Some lines of work that have already been developed in many of the European countries around us.
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