New Zealand’s Bill On Tobacco Endgame:
To fulfil its plan to be smokefree by 2025, the New Zealand Parliament recently tabled the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill.
- Emulating New Zealand, Malaysia is also considering a ban on smoking and the sale of all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, to people born after 2007.
- The Tobacco Endgame refers to a policy approach that focuses on ending the Tobacco Epidemic, aiming at a ‘tobacco-free future’.
- The Bill seeks three Strategies to reduce Smoking significantly or ending it.
- If implemented, it will be the world-first legislation that will stop the next generation from ever being able to legally buy cigarettes.
Strategies Proposed:
- Drastically reducing nicotine content in tobacco so it is no longer addictive (known as “denicotinisation” or “very low nicotine cigarettes” (VLNC)).
- A 90% to 95% reduction in the number of shops that can sell tobacco.
- Making it illegal to sell tobacco to people born on or after 1 January 2009.
