Smokefree 2025 Plan - A Recipe For Failure

The Getting to Smokefree 2025 Plan launched by Associate Minister of Health Casey Costello today will fail to achieve its aim as it excludes key population-based strategies, like those that have been so effective in the past and that this Government repealed.

The plan relies on quit services and a likely expansion of nicotine products without providing incentives to encourage smokers to quit.

"To reach Smokefree 2025 for all New Zealanders we need to provide all the tools, like a reduction in retailers, denicotinisation and effective quit smoking support," Professor Chris Bullen said.

Denicotinisation - the lowering of nicotine levels in cigarettes - and the proposed reduction retailers to 600, would have seen a very rapid decline in smoking rates but these strategies were discarded by the Government.

Effective quit support services are a critical component to achieve Smokefree 2025 as nicotine dependency is extremely hard to combat.

"It is ironic the plan, which includes a ‘renewed focus on smoking cessation services’ is being announced on the same day the National Public Health Service is cutting 55 roles and 300 current vacancies," Bullen said.

"This, and the lack of a budget for the plan makes it hard to believe there will be any real improvement or expansion of those services."

Critically, without support from policies that make smoking less attractive and available, it is simply unrealistic that quit services will achieve Smokefree 2025.

While there has been huge traction in reducing smoking rates in the past decade, the recent annual NZ Health Survey showed that year-on-year declines in our smoking rate stalled for the first time in over a decade, which is extremely concerning.

Additionally, we know that the tobacco industry is once again targeting young people with marketing for smoking through celebrities and other "cigflunecers", along with other campaigns for vaping and oral nicotine.

"Broadly progress has stalled and that suggests our job is going to be a lot harder. The message that has been sent to the public is that the Government isn’t serious about Smokefree 2025, it hasn’t followed through on its rhetoric and it’s gone soft on smoking," Bullen said.

The Minister refers to "providing the most effective services and products" - which is likely to include oral nicotine products and Heated Tobacco Products (HTPs) as Cabinet has already agreed in principle to make ONPs legal and drop tax on HTPs by half.

"It would be a seriously retrograde step to allow ONPs, with all the force of the tobacco industry marketing behind it, it will only worsen an already serious youth nicotine problem," Bullen said.

"Where these products have been made legally available, they have been taken up in large numbers by young people, supported by huge social media campaigns and led to them becoming dependent."

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