I am among the one in five people in the UK who smoke, contributing packet by packet to the £18billion we spend yearly on tobacco products.
My parents have kept the habit their whole lives, as did both sets of grandparents before them.
Having started in my early 20s and maintained a box-a-day addiction ever since, in many ways I’m a walking target for tobacco companies.
In theory, that should also make me a target for health interventions, too. But I see the gory pictures on the box and ignore them, I pay the extra duty each time it’s upped, and I continue to light up despite knowing the implications.
I’m not alone in this – stats show 14.1% of British adults smoke despite extensive measures from the government to curb the habit. So what’s not working?
Why am I, and millions of others, seemingly resistant to tobacco control policies, and what will it take to end smoking for good?
We’ve undoubtedly come a long way since the 1960s, after a landmark US report showed a causal link between tobacco and lung cancer – and successive governments have introduced their own legislation around smoking, with one recent change the ban of menthol, skinny, and crushball options.
A bill was recently tabled in Parliament that would require manufacturers to print warnings such as ‘smoking kills’ on cigarettes themselves, and councils are being given power to create ‘smokefree pavements’.
In this time we’ve seen smoking rates fall considerably, but progress has slowed since an initial drop following the introduction of tobacco controls.
Jessica Lindsay – Metro UK – 2021-12-11.
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