New research published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Prabhat Jha, a public health professor at the University of Toronto and the director of the Centre for Global Health Research of St. Michael’s Hospital, claims that increasing the tax of cigarettes threefold could help reduce smoking by a third worldwide. It could also result in a drop of 200 million smoking related deaths.
The tax will make it harder for youths to attain cigarettes. It will also cause street price of cigarettes to increase, and narrow the gap between expensive and cheap cigarette brands. Researchers hope these factors will encourage smokers to quit, as well as discourage potential smokers from taking up the habit.
Approximately 1.3 billion people smoke worldwide, with two-thirds of these smokers located in Asia, the European Union, the United States and Brazil. In Canada and the United States alone, roughly 200,000 people die each year from cigarette use, but the introduction of this tax could cut that figure to 70,000, a substantial decrease given the simplicity of the solution.
With files from Nature World News and CBS News
