THE Department of Health (DOH) has repeatedly lauded the new round of excise taxation on cigarettes under Republic Act No. 11346 as a way to discourage smoking, hence good for better health.
To quote DOH Secretary Francisco Duque III, “More people will be spared from smoking-related diseases and government’s spending for these diseases will be lessened, ultimately giving us more room to focus on our health promotion efforts.”
Starting in 2020, the government will collect an excise tax of P45 per cigarette pack, an additional P5 per pack per year until it reaches P60 in 2023.
Duque’s health reason, however, is not convincing because previous tax hikes imposed on cigarettes have failed to deter smoking.
People who are really mindful of their health don’t have to be threatened with higher cost of cigarettes. One of them is Toni “June” Tamayo, the Ilonggo regional director of Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) in Region 5 (Bicol).
I used to work with him when he was of lower rank at TESDA-Western Visayas. He would often go out of the office to smoke.
The last time I met him over lunch, he waxed enthusiastic, saying he had stopped smoking.
“How did you do it?” I asked Toni.
“One day,” he answered briefly, “I simply challenged myself to smoke my last stick and really did it.”
By that example, Toni was saying that a really determined quitter would do it in exchange for better health.
I wish my later father had been so determined. He had many times attempted to quit but always resumed. The only time he stopped was when he had caught lung cancer. He passed away as a result.
If you are one of those trying to cut back on your number of sticks because you can’t quit outright, the bad news is that halving the number of cigarettes you smoke daily hardly makes a difference in your risk of dying, according to a study made by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo, Norway.
“A reduction in cigarette consumption by more than 50 percent,” wrote study author Aage Tveral, “is not associated with a markedly lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease or smoking-related cancer.”
The study included over 51,000 men and women between the ages of 20 and 34, who were monitored twice over a period of 20 years.
The participants were grouped according to their smoking history. There were those who never smoked and ex-smokers. But among those who began the study as smokers, there were quitters (stopped smoking over the course of the study), moderate smokers (1-14 cigarettes daily), reducers (started the study while smoking 15 or more cigarettes but cut that number by half) and heavy smokers (15 or more cigarettes a day).
Over the course of the study, the researchers found that there was no difference in the number of smoking-related deaths between the heavy smokers and the reducers. For women, in fact, the death rate from cancer rose in the group that reduced the number of cigarettes they smoked.
Only the group of men who cut back the number of cigarettes they smoked during the first 15 years of the study saw slight improvement in death rates.
Tveral wrote that as a result of his findings, doctors and other health educators should make sure that patients understand that cutting back is not nearly the same as quitting.
In other words, the only safe way out of the risk caused by smoking is to quit. (hvego31@gmail.com /PN)
