Khadija Magardie
Both legislators and the country’s anti-smoking lobby no doubt will welcome findings that tobacco use has dropped dramatically in South Africa.
According to the latest South African Health Review, consumption of tobacco in South Africa “has fallen for eight consecutive years since 1991”. In the year 1998/1999 more than 30-billion cigarettes were released for consumption, which was significantly down by 17%, from the 36-billion released in 1993/1994.
According to Yusuf Saloojee, chair of the National Council against Smoking, who authored a chapter on tobacco consumption for the review, governments have seriously underestimated the dangers of smoking, because of the “incubation period” of tobacco consumption meaning that people do not present with symptoms of smoking-related illnesses immediately. He quotes international statistics indicating that after a population starts smoking, it takes 30 to 40 years before tobacco death rates peak.
The chapter outlines the shift in policy by the government to give greater prominence to tobacco control the introduction mentions that in August last year Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang received the inaugural Luther L Terry award for “exemplary leadership by a government ministry” at the 11th World Conference on Tobacco in Health.
It also mentions that the World Health Organisation lists deaths from HIV/Aids and tobacco as the only two major global causes of death that are increasing. Currently the World Health Organisation attributes approximately four million deaths a year to tobacco.
The Tobacco Products Control Amendment Act, which came into effect in October last year, has drawn fire from several quarters for two controversial aspects, namely the prohibition of tobacco advertising and the restriction of smoking in public places.
The chapter is a helpful guide to the new legislation; it dissects the Bill and the key debates around it. Of particular interest is the argument that squeezing the industry will lead to job losses. The review quotes economists from the University of Cape Town saying that, far from causing job losses, “people who stop smoking will spend their money on other goods and services resulting in an increase in employment in those sectors of the economy supplying these new consumer demands”.
Listing the future challenges in implementing the legislation, Saloojee suggests litigation by individuals against tobacco companies, a proposal bound to stir up as much controversy locally as it did in the United States, where it began.
“Litigation by individual smokers and by governments to recover tobacco attributable health costs,” he says, is “an important strategy”, adding that unlike the US industry, the local tobacco industry has “yet to come clean on what it knew about the harms of smoking”.