Increase tobacco price for health safety

Scorching heat, sweats trickling down from the forehead and he is literally gasping. Standing beside the roadside tea-cigarette stall, rickshaw puller Alom Mia orders a bread and banana. Galloping them hurriedly, he takes a pause and after a while orders for a cigarette. Flashing the lighter, he soaks the feelings inside him and a smiling note reveals in his face. It seems at last he has taken something for having a happy-heart. What he is consuming everyday that gives Alom mia and many like him relief? Well, that is known to all, tobacco. But is it so relieving?
Alom Mia admits honestly that smoking is bad for health. But he never knows how far bad it is for him or for the persons who are exposed to his smoking habits.
What types of cigarettes Alom Mias are buying from the street cigarette sellers? The simplest response of it is they are buying cheap cigarettes. Well, those are made from low quality tobacco, sub-standard filters and so on. According to a report, some 66% of the total cigarette market in Bangladesh belongs to the low standard cheap cigarettes. The report did not include the bidi and other tobacco products, presumably more hazardous to health. So the total volume of sub standard tobacco consumption amassed to a mammoth scale. Tobacco itself has poisonous effect, let alone impact of sub and low standard tobacco. There is hardly anybody who cares about the scale of health hazard to which these low incoming people are exposed to for smoking those tobacco products.
World Health Organisation (WHO) and other anti-tobacco organisations have been crying for a long time to control tobacco proliferation. Bangladesh signed the Framework Convention of Tobacco Control (FCTC) of the WHO calls for increasing prices and taxes on the most consumed cigarettes. It also calls for imposing more than 70% taxes on all kinds of cigarettes.
But in reality, country’s revenue collector National Board of Revenue (NBR) has imposed 54% taxes on cheap cigarettes. The consequence is simple. The health-hazard-unaware people are allowed to consume tobacco incessantly and with the short-time relief from smoking as like Alom Mia did; they are pushed to face the music of major tobacco born diseases in the long run.
Bangladesh spent some Tk 50.9 billion in tobacco related diseases in 2004, according to reports of Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
To stop this equation of excessively high prices in comparison with the fleeting comfort, pragmatic steps have always been sought from concern sectors. The most effective policy in this regard, so far, is increasing prices and taxes of cigarettes, according to WHO. It has lowered the number of smokers worldwide. Following the WHO framework has made success stories in Costa Rica. The country now spends from the money it draws from increasing prices and taxes on cigarettes for Social Security Fund for diagnosis, treatment and prevention of diseases associated with smoking.
Again, the World No Tobacco Day, which will be observed on the last day of the upcoming month, has kept this year’s theme as — Increase Taxes on Tobacco. Considering the health concern of the low incoming people, it is high time Bangladesh increased prices and taxes on cigarettes.