Upgrade of outdated tobacco law on the way at last

A bill seeking to tighten SA’s antismoking legislation and to regulate e-cigarettes is expected to be submitted to parliament before the end of the year, a senior health official said on Thursday.

The Control of Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Bill has been in the pipeline since 2018 and has been staunchly opposed by the tobacco and e-cigarette industries. The government’s failure to process the bill has frustrated public health experts, who say SA has fallen behind global best practice. The 2008 Tobacco Products Control Amendment Act now in force has not been updated in more than a decade and has no measures for regulating new-generation products such as vapes.

The bill proposes a complete ban on smoking in public places, introduces plain packaging, regulates e-cigarettes, prohibits point-of-sale advertising and scraps vending machine sales.

Lorato Mahura from the department of health’s health promotion unit said the govern

ment’s failure to update SA’s antismoking laws and the lack of regulation for new-generation products such as vapes had caused harm.

“I should openly say we apologise to the people of SA. It has really taken too long, and too much damage has been done,” she said during a panel discussion hosted by the Medical Research Council (MRC).

SA’s smoking rates fell sharply between 1998 and 2012, from 32% to 18%, but have risen since 2016 as the government failed to keep pace with the tobacco industry’s tactics, Mahura said.

SA’s 2021 Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) found 41.7% of men and 17.9% of women used tobacco products, with an overall adult prevalence of 30.3%.

“We find ourselves in this situation because we don’t have good laws,” said Mahura, expressing optimism that the measures contained in the bill would curb smoking and the use of e-cigarettes.

Preliminary results of the GATS SA study were released in May. Further analysis revealed findings that refuted the tobacco industry’s claim that e-cigarettes are effective tools for quitting smoking, said the study’s principal investigator, Catherine Egbe, a senior scientist at the MRC’s Alcohol, Tobacco and other Drug Research Unit.

The use of e-cigarettes was highest among survey respondents aged between 15 and 24 years, at 3.1%, and lowest among people aged between 45 and 64 years, who had the highest prevalence of smoking (28.6%). If e-cigarettes were an effective cessation tool, their use should be much greater among the older age group, she said.

The researchers also asked e-cigarette users how long they had been vaping to test the hypothesis that they help users quit cigarettes, and found that more than a fifth (21%) had been using e-cigarettes for more than two years.

“When they market to smokers, they actually want them to switch addictions. That is worrying. We want people to quit for good. When they quit tobacco we want them to be free of nicotine as well,” said Egbe.

E-cigarettes use a heated coil to vaporise nicotine, which is then inhaled by the user.

The study included more than 6,300 people aged 15 years and older, and was conducted in all nine provinces. The prevalence of smoking was highest in Northern Cape (42.3%) and lowest in Limpopo (13.6%).

The majority of survey respondents (88.4%) said they supported a ban on smoking in public places and indoor work areas. Most smokers began using tobacco as teenagers, with 18% doing so before they were 15, and 43% taking up the habit before the age of 16. Respondents expressed strong support for increasing taxes on tobacco and nicotine products.