Tobacco is the single greatest preventable cause of death and disease in the world.
Tobacco prevention and cessation must be addressed. The ECI Eliminate Tobacco program is a global tobacco control effort that integrates policy, education and services to eliminate tobacco use for the next generation.
1 Billion
individuals will die from tobacco over the next century
15 Countries
use child labour to grow tobacco
2.1 Trillion
annually is the global cost of tobacco
80%
of the world's 1.25 billion smokers live in low and middle-income countries with virtually no access to modern cancer care
Why we must raise the age of tobacco purchase from 18 to 21
- 95% of adult smokers start under 21
- Big Tobacco is exploiting their best customer - children
- Every minute of every day, a young adult aged 18-21 becomes hooked on smoking for life
- Worldwide 25 million children smoke more than 800 million packs of cigarettes per year, resulting in almost half a billion dollars in cigarette company profits per annum
What the tobacco industry themselves have said:
“Raising the legal minimum age for cigarette purchaser to 21 could gut our key young adult market (17-20) where we sell about 25 billion cigarettes and enjoy a 70 percent market share,”
Australia stats
- Big tobacco exhausts $31.5 billion from our economy annually. With only $10 billion returned to the Commonwealth in taxes, that’s $20 billion annual loss: enough to build 10 sate of the art hospitals each year
- Every year tobacco kills 15,000 Australians, causes 1 in every 10 deaths, which is 14 times as many deaths as alcohol and 17 times the number of deaths due to illicit drug use
- Tobacco is responsible for 87% of drug related deaths
- If another country was doing this to our children we would be at war