World No to Tobacco Day: Tackling the illicit trade of tobacco products

May 31 is marked every year as “World No to Tobacco Day” to highlight the deleterious effects of tobacco on human health. On the said date, people who habitually smoke Tobacco are advised to abstain from the silent killer for at least 24-hours.

Tobacco is often viewed as a lesser threat to human life compared to other addictive drugs such as cocaine. However, in 2008, the World Health Organization (WHO) described tobacco as the single greatest cause of preventable death globally. This fact summarizes the devastating effect of this seemingly harmless product.

Tobacco is the product obtained from the leaves of the tobacco plant after curing them. The dried leaves are mainly smoked as cigarettes, pipe tobacco, or consumed as snuff or as chewing tobacco. According to the WHO, Tobacco alone contains 4,000 chemicals, out of which 250 are known to be harmful and more than 50 known to cause cancer. Tobacco has been implicated as a risk factor in many diseases affecting the heart, liver and lungs as well as several cancers.

People who commonly use tobacco are therefore likely to go down with heart attacks, strokes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), emphysema, lung cancer, cancer of the mouth and larynx, pancreatic cancer, et cetera. Let me be quick to add that a second-hand smoker—that is a person who involuntary inhales smoke from a smoker is also at risk of developing these diseases. Therefore, whether you are a smoker or not, we should all be concerned.

Notwithstanding the fact that the harmful effects of tobacco use are well known, it is still common to see people pulling frantically at their cigarettes on the streets. This is notwithstanding the fact thatthe Public Health Act 581 of 2012 bans smoking in public places in Ghana. This is perhaps a reminder to the country that we must go beyond legislation to roll out pragmatic and more innovative ways of curbing the indiscriminate use of tobacco in the country.

Apart from the usual awareness creation on the harmful effects of tobacco, this year’s World No to Tobacco Day focuses on the issue of illicit sale of tobacco products. Illicit trade makes tobacco cheaper and more accessible to young people and the poor. This is worrying because the illicit trade of tobacco products creates an easy haven for recruiting more and more smokers. The youth are mostly affected because of their inclination to experiment especially with a cheap product such as tobacco. It is therefore important to take a serious look at the illicit trade of tobacco products and to see how we can add it to the national policy on curbing tobacco use in the country.

Apart from this, illicit trade in tobacco products also denies the government the much needed taxes thatare required for the development of the country. The trade therefore rather diverts funds to criminals who further perpetuate the trade. It is worthy of note however that some big tobacco companies in industry are also involved in the illicit trade in one way or another. Some of them take advantage of loopholes in the tobacco control policy to outsmart the government.

Going forward, the government should intensify the public education on the legislations concerning the use of tobacco in the country. It should also further strengthen the checks on big tobacco companies to ensure that they are complying with all legislation and regulations concerning tobacco control in the country.

Medical practitioners should also join in the awareness creation by advising their clients who have a history of tobacco use on the effects of the product. Patients often have a lot of respect for medical practitioners and so this could be a window of opportunity to help wean off tobacco addicts by helping them appreciate just how devastating the use of tobacco is.