The tobacco industry is playing with prices to make it even harder to quit smoking

Still, it is notoriously difficult to stop smoking. Smoking tobacco is a habit of addiction that the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom has compared to heroin addiction and cocaine.

But that does not mean we can not do anything. Evidence suggests that increasing tobacco taxes is the most effective way to reduce tobacco use. These taxes, recommended by the World Health Organization and the World Bank, increase the price of tobacco products in stores, reducing their price – a situation that encourages smokers to quit and discourages others from starting.

Taxation is particularly important because low-income smokers are less likely to respond to many other anti-smoking campaigns and regulations designed to encourage quitting. Yet these smokers, including many young people, are the most sensitive to rising prices.

If addiction alone is not enough, another challenge is that tobacco companies simply do not want smokers to stop smoking. They do not want to lose their customers and the substantial profits that they provide.

It is therefore not surprising that the tobacco industry has a well-established reputation for weakening regulations to control the use and sale of tobacco in the interest of public health. For example, the largest tobacco companies continued to sell cigarettes to children around the world despite their claim not to, and often in places where advertising is prohibited. In the UK, where tobacco advertising is banned, Philip Morris International has effectively circumvented the ban by launching its recently launched "Stop Smoking" campaign, which continues to promote its tobacco products.

Pay a heavy price

Many of these tactics are obvious, but some are more difficult to detect. Our latest research reveals another: the pricing tactic used by the tobacco industry in the UK minimizes the expected public health impact of rising tobacco taxes.

Tobacco companies offer a cheaper range of products to help people stay smokers (and encourage new consumers to start) while offering a range of more expensive brands to really help those who can not or will not quit smoking .

When tobacco taxes are increased, they play with their prices to mitigate the effects of tax increases on smoking. They absorb tax increases, especially on the cheapest brands, by delaying and stopping planned price increases. In this way, price increases are gradually applied to their brand portfolio to prevent smokers from facing a sudden rise in prices causing cessation when the government raises taxes.

Other tactics adopted by the sector include reducing inflation – reducing the number of cigarettes contained in a package in order to conceal price increases and avoid the cost of a package tobacco is overthrown at certain psychological levels.

Reducing the number of cigarettes in a package from 20 to 19, 18 or even 17, while keeping the price stable, means that the higher cost per cigarette is not immediately obvious for most smokers – and that the producer can achieve bigger profits.

The industry has also used price-tagged packaging to limit the ability of retailers to increase their low profit margin on tobacco sales in order to keep tobacco cheap. Sales of packets of ten cigarettes increased and very small packets of loose tobacco (10g or less) were introduced. These small packages attract the most price-sensitive smokers because they are less expensive to buy.

Such tactics and small packages have recently been banned in the UK with the introduction of standardized packaging (where tobacco must be sold in a standardized format with dull packaging), but they are still available elsewhere. The UK has also introduced a new minimum excise tax which sets the average price at over £ 10 for a pack of 20 cigarettes, thus putting an end to the sale of traditional tobacco products at a very cheap price .

In the end, the tobacco industry would not handle the price if it was not as effective at ensuring that young people start smoking and to prevent existing smokers from quitting To smoke. So what can we do more?

Stubbing it out

Restricting the use of pricing tactics by the industry would be a good option. Companies may be limited in the number of brands and variants of brands that they sell in order to reduce the range of prices offered, as well as in the number of times they can change their prices to allow them to no longer to be able to smooth prices and directly harm public health. benefits of tax increases.

It would even be justified to regulate tobacco prices directly in the same way that prices of utilities, such as water and electricity, are often determined by independent government agencies. Public services are important services, which is why the government is seeking to protect the public from corporate pricing choices. However, tobacco is a very addictive and deadly product for which price also counts.

At the same time, Bloomberg Philanthropies recently announced a US $ 20 million investment for the creation of STOP (Tobacco Organizations and Products that Quit Smoking) – a global tobacco industry watchdog aimed at to make these practices better known. The University of Bath's Tobacco Control Research Group is one of three partners funded to lead this initiative.

The public can not afford to let the industry operate under the radar when the product it manufactures kills two out of three long-term users. This new partnership will serve as a watchdog needed to expose their deadly tactics.

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