Please get moving on tobacco controls
THE Consumers’ Association of Penang (CAP) calls on the Government to implement measures to curb smoking, particularly among women and youths. Tobacco is one of the most preventable public health threats, killing one in every two users.
The World Health Organisation warned that if governments do not take strong action to limit exposure to tobacco, by 2030 it could kill eight million people worldwide annually.
On those grounds, CAP urges the government to take the following measures.
> Extract tobacco control regulations out from the existing Food Act and have a standalone Tobacco Control Act. Tobacco is not a food product and it contains nicotine, a potent poison that is listed under the Poisons Act. In fact, nicotine leaching from wet tobacco leaves can be absorbed through the skin causing “green tobacco sickness”, particularly among tobacco leaf handlers .
> Plain packaging of cigarettes has to be speeded up although there is a possibility that Malaysia has been warned by the Confederation of Malaysian Tobacco Manufacturers that if the government enforces plain packaging on tobacco products, it could have far-reaching implications on the use of trademarks and intellectual property rights in other industries.
Australia, the first country to implement plain packaging in 2012, was taken to court by JT International and British American Tobacco. The Court ruled in favour of the Australian government in a six-to-one decision that “there was no acquisition of intellectual property rights by the Government in its plan to impose plain olive packaging with graphic health warnings”.
In Britain last year, British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco, Philip Morris International and Japan Tobacco International launched a High Court battle against a ban on brand cigarette packaging that was coming into force in May this year.
The judge said that the companies had no right to compensation because they engaged in activities “which impose vast cost on the state” in terms of public health care.
> Complementary to the introduction of plain packaging, Malaysia should also consider the licensing of cigarette retailers or tobacconists, to monitor legal cigarette retailers and weed out those selling smuggled cigarettes. Currently there are more than 80,000 cigarette retailers in the country, not including street vendors.
Four countries in Asean have already implemented the licensing of cigarette retailers/vendors. Brunei charges an equivalent of RM976.25 per licence and Singapore, RM1,171.75.
> It is unthinkable why nicotine in tobacco products, particularly cigarettes, is exempted from being classified under Group C poisons of the Malaysian Poisons Act 1952 (Revised 1989) and Regulations. The reason lies in the fact that a mere 60 mg of nicotine is capable of paralysing the central nervous system, causing death.
Nicotine should not be exempted since it is the most accessible poison, available to five million smokers in the country. It should be regulated just like any other poison under Group C that “shall not be sold or supplied by retail to any person except as a dispensed medicine or an ingredient in a dispensed medicine”.
CAP iterates the call to implement the measures proposed above to tighten tobacco control in Malaysia.