"But in the future simply limiting tobacco production may not work as e-cigarettes would have taken the place of ordinary cigarettes. In my opinion, as tobacco plantations decrease, e-cigarettes will move up the ladder. We have to put out all efforts to regulate production and sale of e-cigarettes now--they may not have tobacco, but perhaps other worse chemicals. Lung-cancer incidence has not plateaued off yet and I am afraid that e-cigarettes may worsen the situation."
As an end note it would be pertinent to recognize India's latest efforts to curb tobacco consumption. India's Ministry of Health and Family Welfare is currently inviting suggestions from the public for the draft Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act (COTPA) Amendment Bill 2015, proposed by it. Apart from increasing the penalties for smoking in restricted areas, producing/selling tobacco products without approved packaging, the bill also seeks to ban onsite advertising of tobacco products, scrap designated smoking areas in hotels, restaurants and domestic airports, raise the minimum age for buying tobacco products to 21 years, ban spitting of tobacco products in public places--all of which if implemented properly will go a long way in purifying the air we breathe.
Let us hope that we can collectively strive hard for a tobacco-free environment, as wished by Dr Sumitra Thongprasert, and, in the process, curtail lung and some other forms of cancer too.
Shobha Shukla, CNS
(The author is the Managing Editor of CNS. She is a J2J Fellow of National Press Foundation (NPF) USA and received her editing training in Singapore. She has earlier worked with State Planning Institute, UP and taught physics at India's prestigious Loreto Convent. She also co-authored and edited publications on gender justice, childhood TB, childhood pneumonia, Hepatitis C Virus and HIV, and MDR-TB. Email: shobha|AT|citizen-news.orgEmail address, website: www.citizen-news.org)
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