Sharon
Brettkelly, for The Detail
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.
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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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