Tobacco control policy and regulation from diverse perspectives and contexts

This issue brings together studies providing different perspectives of tobacco regulation and policy for cigarettes, heated tobacco products (HTPs), waterpipe tobacco, e-cigarettes and other products. Taxation is cost-effective for governments while reducing smoking prevalence. Ngo et al provide evidence for the underused potential of this policy lever.1 Using the Tobacconomics scorecard and drawing on 2014-2020 data, they show that modest improvement in tax policy scores globally reduced cigarette consumption by 3.27%, but this could have been reduced by 20.74% with optimal tax policies. Low-income and middle-income countries stood to gain even more, with the potential to reduce consumption by 28.05%. In contrast to cigarettes, waterpipe tobacco taxes are under-researched. Jawad et al address this by modelling waterpipe taxes for Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine.2 They highlight the need for context specific modelling, noting that waterpipe smoking in cafes has a high industry mark-up which reduces the...
Source: Tobacco Control - Category: Respiratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Open access Editorial Source Type: research