New Zealand has introduced one of the world's most revolutionary crackdowns on the tobacco industry by planning to ban those who are aged 14 and under from purchasing cigarettes.
This will prevent people in this age bracket from being able to buy tobacco legally, in a bid to phase out smoking amongst their population of five million and create a smoke-free generation within the next four years.
New legislation dictates that the legal smoking age will increase each year, said New Zealand's Associate Minister of Health, Ayesha Verrall, in a statement on Thursday, December 9.
"This is a historic day for the health of our people," she asserted, per BBC News.
"We want to make sure young people never start smoking so we will make it an offense to sell or supply smoked tobacco products to new cohorts of youth," Verrall continued, arguing that other measures were not doing enough, quick enough.
"People aged 14 when the law comes into effect will never be able to legally purchase tobacco. If nothing changes, it would be decades till Māori smoking rates fall below 5%, and this government is not prepared to leave people behind."
This comes amongst other measures to make the habit inaccessible financially, including reducing the legal amount of nicotine in tobacco products to minuscule levels, reducing the number of shops where cigarettes are sold legally, and giving more funding to addiction services.
The new laws, however, will not impact the sale of vaping products.
The New Zealand government claims that these rules would effectively halve the country's smoking rates in as little as 10 years from implementation.
Per government figures, as reported by The Guardian, 11.6 percent of all New Zealanders over the age of 15 smoke cigarettes. This rises dramatically to 29 percent amongst indigenous Maori adults.
Defending their recent move, health officials said that while existing measures, such as plain packaging and increased taxes, had slowed the sale of cigarettes, tougher sanctions were needed to meet their goal of ensuring that fewer than five percent of their population smoked daily by 2025.
The new restrictions will be rolled out in stages from 2024. It will begin with a marked reduction in the number of authorized tobacco sellers, then there will be reduced nicotine requirements in 2025, and then the aim to create a "smoke-free" generation from 2027.
"Cigarette smoking kills 14 New Zealanders every day and two out of three smokers will die as a result of smoking," added New Zealand Medical Association chair Alistair Humphrey in a statement. "This action plan offers some hope of realizing our 2025 Smokefree Aotearoa goal, and keeping our tamariki (Maori children) smokefree."
However, there has been pushback from retailers who are concerned about the impact on their businesses, and the black market implications.
A lobbying group for local convenience stores told Stuff.co.nz: "This is all 100 per cent theory and zero per cent substance. There’s going to be a crime wave. Gangs and criminals will fill the gap with ciggie houses alongside tinnie houses."
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