It can be easy to scoff at the annual or even biannual days designated by various agencies and organisations to attack the practice of smoking and to try to encourage the cessation of this addictive and deadly habit. No such designated day can have any significant effect, they say, in getting smokers off the habit and, indeed, the decline in the number of smokers has been slow when set against the various campaigns to encourage smokers to stop. It may be slow: but it's not insignificant. Nearly half (44 percent) of Irish adults were smokers in the early 1970s. Fewer than a third (30 percent) are smokers now. That signifies a large number of lives saved and serious illnesses reduced.
But about 7,000 Irish people still die each year from smoking-related diseases, and there are seriously worrying indications that, while the number of adults smoking has declined, more children may be smoking than ever before. An addiction to nicotine acquired in childhood is no easier to break than such addiction in adults. This bodes ill for the future prospects of the public's health and lessens the chance of significant savings in the cost of the health services.
Nonetheless, these occasions on which people are asked to look critically at the use of tobacco can have a cumulative effect, and can serve as milestones from which to survey such progress as has been made from year to year in the long slow war against the commonest cause of death in the world. An estimated four million people in the world die each year from the effects of smoking. The survey from this "no tobacco day" indicates both progress and failure in comparison with previous years. The number of adult smokers appears to continue to decline, however slowly. The number of childhood smokers appears to continue to increase, and not so slowly, and it has been reckoned that 90 percent of addicted adults have become addicted to nicotine before they reached 20 years of age.
It is clear that there is need for much more stringent enforcement of the law prohibiting the sale of cigarettes to children. It is also clear that more emphasis must be placed on the services available to aid and support smokers who want to stop and there is a reasonable economic argument (as well as a preventive health argument) for the making available of nicotine replacement therapy on medical prescription for medical card-holders.
There also appears to be good reason to continue and intensify those activities that are hostile to the acceptance of tobacco smoke where any two or more people are gathered together. Hostility to the profitable trading of the tobacco industry has much to commend it: 95 percent of the cigarettes which kill 7,000 Irish people each year are manufactured in Ireland. The Minister for Health and Children, Mr Martin is to be commended for banning most tobacco advertising and sponsorship from July 1st, and for increasing the age at which tobacco can legally sold to young people from 16 to 18 years, and for increasing the penalties levied on those who break this law. Hopefully, there may be some broader legal challenges to the tobacco industry here, as in the United States in recent years, which will impose further restrictions and greater penalties. The killer must be curbed.