Campaigner calls for €30m fund to reduce teen smoking

THE COST of a really effective smoking awareness programme works out at just 10 cents for every packet of cigarettes smoked in Ireland, a leading international expert on smoking prevention has said.

Danny McGoldrick, the director of research at the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids in the United States, estimated that the cost of providing such a State-wide programme would be about €30 million, based on the amount of money recommended for Oregon, a state similar in population to Ireland.

Currently, the budget for the Office of Tobacco Control, which is charged with smoking prevention in Ireland, is about €2.5 million.

A concerted campaign directed at Oregon’s teenagers has seen the number of smokers drop by half in less than 10 years. The state estimates the campaign has stopped 52,000 teenagers taking up the habit.

Mr McGoldrick told an international conference on smoking in Dublin’s Mansion House that rates of adult smoking in California had dropped by almost half in the past 20 years since the state began pouring serious resources into prevention.

He explained that the money needed to be spent on community initiatives along with a well-resourced national media advertising campaign.

“The evidence is very clear,” he said. “Numerous reviews of various tobacco programmes have concluded that we need to provide the resources to stop people developing the habit in the first place.”

He estimated that 280 million packets of cigarettes are sold in Ireland every year, meaning that funding such a programme would amount to about 10 cent a packet.

“If you could earmark or otherwise allocate 10 cent a pack to the kind of programmes that we know work in terms of preventing our children starting smoking in the first place and helping people quit smoking, this is a worthy investment,” he said.

“It’s not that we can’t afford to do it, it’s that we can’t afford not to do it. That’s when you think that 6,000 people die in Ireland every year and you consider the healthcare costs.”

Another American anti-smoking campaigner, Eric Asche, told the conference that adults should never presume to know what it takes to stop teenagers taking up smoking.

Mr Asche, the senior vice- president in marketing of the American Legacy Foundation, a charity targeted at stopping teenagers taking up the habit, said teenagers were naturally rebellious and that the “just say no” approach never works.

He said the highly successful Truth® media marketing campaign, which has been credited with stopping 300,000 American teenagers from smoking since 2000, was based on advice from teenagers themselves.

A series of grainy advertisements which lampooned the Marlboro man advertising campaign were so effective that teenagers presumed that their own age cohort had been responsible for it. “We took that as a serious compliment,” he said.

“I can’t tell you enough the amount of times I thought we had the answer figured out and we presented our work to teenagers and it drew a blank. We have learned from our mistakes. It may not make sense to me, but if the teen understands it then it will be effective.”