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The French government has unveiled a raft of measures to curb tobacco consumption, including a gradual increase in the cost of cigarettes, more smoking bans in public places, and a ban on vapes.
With one quarter of its adult population smoking every day, France has one of the highest smoking rates in the Western world. The proportion of smokers in France exceeds the average of the OECD countries by 40%. And what’s more worrying is that although the number of smokers in France decreased every year for several decades, this figure has remained relatively unchanged since 2018.
This stagnation is why a few days after the end of the country’s Tobacco-Free Month, France’s Health Minister Aurélien Rousseau presented the government’s new plan to combat smoking. The aim is to revive the decline in smoking rates and help France to catch up with other Western countries in terms of tobacco consumption. “Each year, France pays a heavy price for its high smoking rates, with smoking remaining the leading cause of avoidable death; the country sees 75,000 deaths per year, which is equivalent to 200 deaths per day,” stated the minister in his introduction.
The first part of the government’s plan involves gradually increasing the price of a packet of cigarettes, a measure deemed to be “the most effective action against smoking, according to the World Health Organization (WHO),” said the minister. Currently fixed at € 11, the cost of a packet of cigarettes will be raised to € 12 in 2025 and to € 13 in 2027. For comparison, a packet was priced at € 5 in 2006 and
€ 7 in 2016.
Naysayers will note that the cost of a packet of cigarettes would have reached similar levels regardless because Parliament voted last year to index tobacco taxes in response to inflation. So the cost of a packet of cigarettes would have increased by 40-50 centimes from January 1, 2024 anyway, according to calculations made by the country’s Confederation of Tobacconists.
New Smoking Bans
Rousseau also announced an increase in smoking bans in public places. For now, local authorities have the power to ban smoking in certain public spaces, and there are currently 7200 no-smoking areas across the country’s 73 departments. “Today, we are reversing the responsibility and setting out this rule, which will become law,” explained the minister.
From now on, it will be illegal to smoke on beaches, in public parks and forests, and near certain public spaces, such as schools, across the whole country. The government’s aim here is to “denormalize” cigarette use in public spaces — a measure that is not to everyone’s liking. “Enough with the restrictions to freedoms that don’t harm others, what is the health impact of this moral measure in the face of the smoking scourge?” said David Lisnard, the mayor of Cannes.
Finally, Rousseau confirmed the upcoming fulfillment of a promise made by the government several months ago: banning vapes, which are disposable e-cigarettes favored by teenagers. Vaping, which the minister described as an “aberration of both public and environmental health,” will be banned by a proposed bill seeking to “prohibit single-use electronic vaping devices” that will be examined at the country’s National Assembly in committee and in its legislative debating chamber, the Hemicycle.
New Zealand Backtracks
Despite the numerous measures announced, which also comprise strengthening support strategies for smokers, it is unlikely that this new plan will satisfy the antismoking lobby. These groups have still not forgiven the government for having refused to increase taxes on smoking in the country’s bill for funding social security in 2024.
“For them to work, tax increases must be robust, implemented year on year, and continue over time” said France’s national antismoking committee in response to the announced price increase for tobacco in 2025. “This will change nothing, it will have no impact,” lamente Loïc Josseran, MD, PhD, chair of the French antismoking alliance, which is lobbying for the price of a packet of cigarettes to go up to € 16.
Going against the grain, economist Jérôme Mathis wrote in Le Monde that he doesn’t believe that increasing cigarette costs is the solution (he uses the fact that a packet of cigarettes is more expensive in France than in most other European countries as evidence). Instead, the government should focus on organizing prevention campaigns in schools, he said. The antismoking alliance is also lobbying for a change in legislation to levy massive fines on the smoking industry, as the United States has done.
The government hopes that this new antismoking plan will achieve the ambitious goal of creating a smoke-free generation by 2032. To achieve this goal, one of the solutions that the government has not considered would be to increase the minimum legal age required to buy cigarettes by 1 year each year, so preventing all people born after a certain date from purchasing tobacco. New Zealand adopted such a measure last December, but it never saw the light of day.
On the day he was sworn in, New Zealand’s new Prime Minster Christopher Luxon announced that he would abolish this law. The conservative leader thinks that a law of this kind would risk creating a black market for cigarettes, as well as lowering the state’s tax revenue. Ultimately, it is the increased taxes on tobacco that prevents it from being banned.
This article was translated from JIM, which is part of the Medscape Professional Network.
