Smoking cigarettes kills. There’s simply no way to escape that fact.
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Most of the time, a smoking related death is horrific and painful. As a society, we should be doing everything we can to help smokers quit, and even more importantly – stop people taking up the habit in the first place.
A report released this week by independent health analyst Martyn Goddard, using figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, showed that there was a 6.7 per cent rise in the number of Tasmanians aged between 15 and 24 who were taking up the habit.
This is a shocking statistics and clearly shows that we need a new approach to arrest our insidious addiction to tobacco and its deadly effects.
What’s worse is that the number of people smoking in all other age groups actually declined.
We can no longer blame advertising for somehow glorifying cigarette smoking, or trying to make smokers appear somehow cool or sexy. There has been a ban in place on any form of advertising for years in Australia. And the governments have made it compulsory for manufacturers to highlight the dangers of smoking on every packet they sell in this country.
Even as the price of cigarettes skyrocket to the point where they’re seemingly unaffordable, our young people still find themselves drawn to the evils of nicotine like moths to a floodlight.
State and federal governments spend millions of dollars every year on campaigns designed to warn us how bad it is for us to smoke.
So what else can we do? That’s the $31.5 billion dollar question. Smoking-related diseases kill almost 15,000 Australians a year. That's 40 people every day. It costs society almost $32 billion a year in health and other related costs.
Lung cancer accounts for three-in-four cancers in men and 72 per cent in women. It’s time to make the big decisions and take meaningful steps to break the habit.
Steps like the state government’s proposal to raise the legal smoking age to 21 or even 25. We have already banned smoking from sporting venues, restaurants, bars, malls and workplaces.
The idea of raising the legal smoking age to 25 may seem radical to some – even preposterous to a few – but when you consider that most people take up smoking before they turn 25, the concept of a ban sounds much more reasoned.