EU launches second campaign to stamp out smoking

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Europe’s health chief unveiled a lavish campaign on Tuesday to stamp out smoking across the European Union and reduce the hundreds of thousands of deaths each year that are blamed on consuming tobacco.

“It upsets me, it makes me furious that the single cause of so many preventable diseases is still there,” EU Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner Markos Kyprianou said two days after a global anti-smoking treaty went into force.

"The target of this campaign will be young people and we know they are the target of the tobacco companies,” he said. “The average age of taking up smoking in the EU has gone down to 13. This is a very worrying trend,” he told a news conference.

The campaign, called “HELP - For a life without tobacco”, is the EU’s second and will cost 72 million euros ($95.13 million) up to 2008. The first ended in December and cost 18 million over three years.

Kyprianou, an ex-smoker himself, has said there is no bigger evil to be battled than cigarettes and would like to see EU states impose national smoking bans in public places. So far, he has shied away from proposing anything like an EU-wide ban.

More than 650,000 Europeans die every year from the effects of smoking, bringing EU governments an annual bill of more than 100 billion euros in costs for sickness and death, he said.

The anti-tobacco campaign will go on tour around the EU’s 25 capital cities, with television advertisements to run from the end of May based on the themes of tobacco-free lifestyles for young people, the dangers of passive smoking and how to quit.

Over the years, the EU has taken as number of legal steps on tobacco control. From July, all tobacco advertising on the radio, internet and print media will be banned in EU countries - and has been banned EU-wide on television since 1989.

Since 2003, EU law also requires high-visibility, hard-hitting health warnings on all tobacco products sold in the bloc. It also bans cigarette labels such as “light” or “mild”.

The Commission has published grisly photos of rotten lungs, throat tumours and decayed teeth which it hopes that EU states will use on cigarette packets to ram home the written warnings, hoping to persuade smokers to quit and children never to start.

A Cypriot, Kyprianou said he knew himself just how difficult it was to give up smoking.

“It’s been 15 years since I gave up smoking. I just decided one day I wasn’t going to go on killing myself every day so I just stopped. It’s an addiction - you get hooked,” he said. 

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