Russia's legislation to ban smoking in public places

Abstract

As of June 1, Russia has banned smoking in some public places; these include public transport, stairways of housing blocks, and the workplace. The ban will be extended to other public spaces in 2014. “The ban represents the success of a large number of Russian cardiovascular, cancer, and public health specialists who, over the years, have demonstrated the dreadful eff ects of tobacco smoking, coupled in men with heavy alcohol drinking, in increasing the burden of death and disease”, said Paolo Boff etta (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA). Currently, about 40% of the Russian population are smokers and in 2012, nearly 400 000 Russians died from smoking-related illnesses. According to John Britton (UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK), smoking is the biggest avoidable cause of premature death and disability, especially in Russia, where the prevalence of smoking in men has been particularly high for many years, and is still about 50%. He explained, “This high prevalence of smoking is already manifested in a massive toll of disease, particularly lung cancer, COPD, and cardiovascular disease”. Boff etta explained that a reduction in opportunities to smoke in public settings has been repeatedly shown to reduce exposure to second-hand smoke. He said, “The same arguments [against the ban] were used in California, Ireland, Italy, and France, to name a few, and each time they turned out to be wrong: the overwhelming majority of the population—nonsmokers and smokers alike—supported the ban, smokers complied with the new regulation, and business in bars and restaurants went up, not down”. Giuseppe Gorini (Cancer Research and Prevention Institute, Florence, Italy) has faith in the ban being successful—“No one would have bet that the Italians would have accepted the smoking ban. Unexpectedly, Italians complied with the ban. Why? One of the most important things that, in my opinion, favoured this acceptance was the high levels of news media coverage of this issue. In Italy the smoke-free policy development went on for at least 3 years”. Although Britton believes that the smoking ban in Russia will reduce the prevalence of smoking much more quickly than has been the case, it will be decades before this trend translates into reductions in death and disability due to smoking.