KEY POINTS:
On July 19, Republican Senator Mike Enzi introduced Bill S1834 into the United States Senate to reduce the prevalence of smoking to 2 per cent within 20 years. That would be achieved by allotting quotas to manufacturers (called capping), depending on their market share over the past few years, and then reducing those quotas.
In the film Amazing Grace, we saw how abolitionist William Wilberforce had to resort to legislation to end Britain's addiction to slavery dollars. He would have approved of Enzi's bill, which goes beyond the reducing quotas I recently proposed in the New Zealand Medical Journal.
Enzi's strategy is to allow manufacturers to trade or bank their quotas, which are annually reduced. Cigarette prices begin to gradually increase, as the manufacturers seek to take their profit quickly, before smokers, finding the habit too costly, begin quitting in droves. Price spirals up; consumption spirals down.
The idea is that most people quit. A few may switch to nicotine or to cigarette substitutes popular overseas, such as snuff. Anything is safer than smoking cigarettes, and provision must be made for smokers' need for nicotine. Nicotine can addict, but it is the smoking that kills.
Many smokers will miss their cigarettes, while others will welcome their improved health and increased longevity. In either case, their families will love it.
The Ministry of Health's I Think systems software predicts a steady, just-under 5000 deaths annually from smoking for the next several decades. But under cap and trade those numbers could decrease dramatically and the strategy could be used by countries at any stage of economic development.
Enzi took his lead from a 1990 law in the US to control acid rain pollution, in which cap and trade worked well, and faster than expected. Can the health experts learn from this? Do we know of any such examples in Australian or New Zealand law?
What would prevent it working in New Zealand? Who among us has seen cap and trade law at first hand? The method seems simple, proven, and robust.
It is a direct way to end cigarette sales altogether, rather than seeking to regulate the industry or its irredeemably toxic products.
Smoking control experts should not be too proud to take inspiration out of left field, or in this case from the political right. Enzi calls his bill the HEALTH Bill (Helping End Addiction to Lethal Tobacco Habits).
A combination of the Greens, Maori, and one of the two main parties could vote something like this into law. Until they do, smoking will reduce at the present funereal pace.
Cigarette company Philip Morris opposes the Enzi bill, and it is unlikely to succeed this year. The big American anti-smoking groups (Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, and the Lung, Heart and Cancer charities) also oppose it.
These four groups, with Philip Morris, support a safer Democrats bill to regulate cigarettes under the Food and Drug Administration. But regulating cigarettes implies continued sales.
Cigarettes, regulated or not, kill half of continuing smokers. Not even the American Food and Drug Administration can make them safe enough for the next generation.
In New Zealand, however, with 200,000 New Zealanders killed by smoking cigarettes already, the countdown needs to begin.
A TV3 poll last year showed 52 per cent of adults wanted an end to cigarette sales. The support will increase once we can explain how it can be made to happen.
An Enzi-style amendment to the Smokefree Environments Act could reduce smoking to 2 per cent. Even if those 2 per cent grow their own tobacco, the glamour will be gone.
And if Enzi says 20 years is necessary in the US, I believe New Zealand with one legislature could make that 10.
Let's get the show on the road. As the Smokefree Coalition has noted, a roadshow around the country would be needed to explain the new goal and the possible ways to get there. Let the countdown begin.
* Murray Laugesen is a cigarette researcher and chairs the SmokeLess New Zealand Trust, www.smokeless.org.nz.
