Doctor says lip service paid to tobacco control

The State pays lip service to the notion of tobacco control but does little to prevent smoking and had a battery of legislation to limit tobacco use but this is not being enforced, an Irish public health specialist has said. It was not that the State didn't have strategies to control smoking, particularly among teenagers, stated Dr Fenton Howell of the North Eastern Health Board. There were strategies to reduce teen smoking, to stop smoking in public areas and encourage companies to introduce no-smoking regimes.

The session included speakers from Northern Ireland and the EU on the theme, "Tobacco Control". The strategy for youth smoking, he said, was meant to bring down tobacco use among the young by a percentage point per year, but rather than going down, tobacco use actually went up by a percentage point a year from 1994. "While we pay lip service, we don't do anything much about it."

A great deal of legislation had been introduced in the past 10 years controlling tobacco company sponsorship and regulating where smoking might occur. However these tended to say that public health officials "may" enforce the regulations. They should be changed to read "shall", he said.

"There is a real problem with the legislation because it is not enforced. While the legislation looks good in one sense, it is a bit ridiculous on the other." Ireland needed to begin prosecuting offenders, he said, for example, those who sold cigarettes to children.

Dr Howell presented statistics of the smoking population which showed that 32 per cent of males and 31 per cent of females were regular smokers. There was also a "large social gradient for smoking" in Ireland, with a higher percentage of smokers from lower socio-economic groupings.

The smoking totals for young women between 18 and 34 years were particularly bad, he said with about 40 per cent of this group smoking regularly. This was despite years of education programmes warning of the dangers of smoking, an activity which was responsible for about 6,500 deaths each year in Ireland.

Education was not helping, although it was well known what "works on young people - price and advertising.

Many studies had shown that most smokers, 80 per cent, expressed a desire to stop and 74 per cent had tried to quit at some time in the past. This he said was like a "cry for help". The Government should answer by providing nicotine replacement treatments - the familiar nicotine patch, gum or inhalers - free of charge.

"We give insulin to diabetics, we should do the same thing for nicotine replacement therapy," Dr Howell said.