OUTRIGHT TOBACCO BAN NEEDED, NOT CONTROL

Trinidad and Tobago’s ratifying last week of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control may strike many as a giant step, but what is needed by this country at this time is not the halfway measure that the Convention represents, but an outright ban on the cancer inducing narcotic. Government should set a date, perhaps January, 2014 for the ban to come into effect. In the interim, Government should come up with an ever widening list of areas and events in and at which tobacco smoking would not be allowed.

In much the same way that Trinidad and Tobago had the courage decades ago to impose a ban on the trafficking in and use of marijuana, it must have the same courage today to ban the growing and/or importing of tobacco and the production and sale of cigarettes. The statistics provided last week by President of the Cancer Society, Dr George Laquis — 100 million persons died in the 20th century from tobacco use and that the tobacco industry had cost the world US$200 billion — are instructive. And when you add to them Dr Laquis’ charge that tobacco has been identified as “the single greatest threat to man’s health in the modern world,” then clearly stronger measures are needed than mere “tobacco control.” Concern about the life-threatening effects of tobacco is not an overnight thing, a “vaps” that suddenly hit the international community last year causing the WHO to come up with its Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

As early as 1953 and 1954 official United States medical advice had identified repeated cigarette smoking as a factor in lung cancer and heart disease. A decade later, indeed in January of 1964 a landmark report by the United States Surgeon General had emphasised it yet further as a factor in the two diseases. In turn, the Surgeon General issued the now famous declaration that smoking was dangerous to health, and made it mandatory that cigarette manufacturers print this warning, in a conspicuous manner, on the outside of every pack of cigarettes. Many major passenger airlines have defined areas in their aircraft in which no smoking is permitted. Several have effected outright bans. Government, in the interest of the health of citizens should define areas of public places, for example restaurants, hotels, night clubs, bars where smoking would not be allowed. This should embrace also places where public fetes and public events are held. In turn, it should make it an offence punishable by law for anyone found smoking in a school building or in a school yard whether or not school is in progress.

Additionally, the Ministry of Health should initiate an ongoing public education programme about the dangers to health both of smoking to the smokers, and secondary smoke to others who may be in enclosed areas where persons are puffing away on cigarettes, cigars or pipes, with specific reference to air-conditioned rooms and offices. Already, in Trinidad and Tobago, the Hosanna Hotel, of Santa Margarita Circular Road, St Augustine, from its inception in 1992 instituted a ban on smoking. The no smoking policy applies to guests, visitors and staff anywhere in the hotel or on its compound. The 20-room Hosanna Hotel, owned by retired Judge, Dr Aeneas Wills, is one of the few hotels in the Western World, where such a ban is in effect.

In addition, there is a ban on alcohol, and the quite favourable year-round occupancy rate of the hotel is proof that others in the hospitality industry in Trinidad and Tobago can either follow Hosanna’s ban on smoking or begin by setting out areas where smoking is banned and gradually extending them without loss of patronage. I had referred earlier to the dangers of secondary smoke. What is not often understood is that individuals who are constantly in enclosed areas where others are smoking, for example offices, are also just as much at risk of developing lung cancer and heart disease as the smokers themselves. Because of this any move for a national ban on smoking is in everyone’s interest, smoker and non-smoker alike. The non-smoker cannot hold himself aloof from any campaign, whenever it begins, for a ban on smoking in Trinidad and Tobago, as every person who works in an office alongside heavy smokers, or who regularly limes in smoke- filled bars, restaurants and night clubs is a candidate, however unwittingly, for lung cancer etc, and with it a shortened life span.