When double standards reek of tobacco

Tuesday 8th June, 2021

The government has had to give public health priority over everything else and extend the current countrywide lockdown to prevent the spread of Covid-19. It could have saved many more lives than those lost in the Easter Sunday carnage if it had cared to heed doctors’ warnings and imposed travel restrictions in April. Had it allowed the public health professionals to decide what should be done to prevent the transmission of the runaway virus, it would have been able close the proverbial stable door in time without having to run madly behind the horse fleeing in a furious gallop. However, better late than never. Drastic pandemic control measures entail huge economic costs, as is public knowledge, but are necessary to bring the health emergency under control and save lives.

The government would have us believe that it is very concerned about public health, and that is why it is determined to go ahead with lockdowns until the virus relents. The economy is screaming, and so are the people troubled by the pangs of hunger. The government has also imposed a ban on chemical fertilisers on the grounds that they are harmful to public health and the environment. It has done so despite warnings in some quarters that its action could lead to a huge decrease in the national agricultural output and a food scarcity. It insists that the country’s sudden switchover to organic fertilisers will benefit the public and the economy in the long run. But the question is why it does not go by the same logic anent other harmful substances that ruin public health and cost the state coffer much more than the tax revenue they help generate. Tobacco is a case in point.

A UNDP publication, Investment Case for Tobacco Control in Sri Lanka—the case for scaling up WHO FCTC implementation, informs us that tobacco use costs Sri Lanka about 1.6% of its GDP, or around Rs. 214 billion a year, according to 2016 statistics. The tobacco-related health expenditure alone totals Rs. 15.3 billion, and the indirect productivity costs the economy has to bear due to tobacco-attributable premature mortality, disability and workplace smoking, amounts to a whopping Rs. 199 billion, the publication says.

Agrochemicals are harmful but not without benefits, if used in the prescribed manner, as the opponents of the ban thereon argue. However, by no stretch of the imagination could cigarettes, etc., be considered products with any benefits; they only benefit the tobacco industry, which thrives on the suffering of its customers. Cigarette is the only product that kills one out of two consumers, according the Health Ministry’s Profile on Tobacco Control in Sri Lanka. Tobacco-related illnesses kill more people daily than Covid-19 does; they cause about 57 deaths per day in this country, according to the Health Ministry statistics. The number of lives lost in road accidents averages eight, and the errant drivers responsible for them face legal action, but those who amass wealth at the expense of as many as 57 lives a day do so with impunity! Global statistics are even more chilling; tobacco kills more than eight million people around the world annually, according the WHO.

So, if the government’s much-publicised claim that it acted out of its concern for public health in banning chemical fertiliser is true, then why does it baulk at adopting the same modus operandi in dealing with the tobacco menace, especially cigarettes? One of the world’s foremost medical research centres—the National Institutes of Health, one of the agencies of the US Department of Health and Human Services—informs us that cigarettes could act as a gateway drug; they could open the door to the use of illicit drugs. One may recall that some of the present-day leaders have a history of securing financial assistance from the tobacco industry to develop schools and police stations; this, they have done although schoolchildren targeted by the tobacco industry, and the police tasked with enforcing the anti-tobacco laws, must not be made to feel that they are beneficiaries of the largesse of the tobacco industry.