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Banning public smoking indoors in the Philippines: could it help 16 million people kick the habit?
- A bill to ban almost all public smoking indoors is currently before Congress in the Philippines, where 110,000 people die from smoking-related diseases each year
- Advocates say education is as important as legislation, however – and emphasise the role that smokers’ communities can play in their rehabilitation
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Geela Garciain Manila
Anti-tobacco advocates have for years pushed for a “tobacco endgame”, where young people will be banned from ever buying cigarettes in their lifetimes. New Zealand got the ball rolling when it announced its intention to gradually raise the minimum smoking age, so that it would be illegal for anyone born after 2008 to buy cigarettes. Singapore said New Zealand’s proposal was “attractive”, while Malaysia said it was mulling a plan to ban the sale of tobacco products to people born after 2005. In the final report of a three-part series, This Week in Asia takes a look at discussions on kicking the habit in Malaysia, India and the Philippines. Read part one here and part two here.
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Rofwiel and his friends were as young as 10 when they first fooled around with cigarettes. Now, the 14-year-old says the six of them regularly meet at his poorly ventilated flat to “chill”: an allusion to hanging out and smoking.
“I was curious because some of my friends were smoking. They’d make those tricks with the smoke rings that put a halo of smoke on your head,” Rofwiel said, laughing.
The Philippines has a wide-ranging law regulating sales of cigarettes to minors, smoking in public places and tobacco advertising, among other things, that has been in place since 2003. Outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte signed an executive order in 2017 further restricting smoking, and a bill currently before Congress seeks to eliminate almost all public smoking indoors by amending the 2003 act.
Yet in 2020, some 16 per cent of 13- to 15-year-olds in the Philippines were still using tobacco products, according to US advocacy group the Campaign for Free Tobacco Kids – with more than one-quarter in that age group reporting trying tobacco at some point in their lives, data collected for the World Health Organization-backed Global Youth Tobacco Survey in 2019 showed.
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Typically, teachers and school officials would attempt to dissuade children from smoking by following the Philippine education authority’s tobacco control guidelines. But with schools closed for much of the pandemic, and students like Rofwiel switched to distance learning, this first line of defence has largely evaporated.
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