EDITORIAL

Overview of tobacco control politics in Romania

Florin Mihălțan
Overview of tobacco control politics in Romania Tobacco control politics aims to help adults to quit smoking and deter children from starting. For developing countries like Romania, if we are looking at the Tobacco Facts 1(1), it's a whole list of objectives from price measures to non-price measures (advertising and promotion, publicizing tobacco research, warning labels, nicotine replacement therapy, restrictions on smoking in public places and at the workplace, smuggling problems, employment, tax revenues and taxation, trade restriction, prohibition, restriction on teenage smoking, crop substitution etc.).
I will try to analyze all these measures at this moment (January 2017) because, even if Romania ratified the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) on January 2006, many things were applied only from 2016. I have to do this also because we are celebrating the 32nd tobacco-related Surgeon General's report issued since 1964, highlighting 50 years of progress in tobacco control and prevention, with new data on the health consequences of smoking, and discussing opportunities that can potentially end the smoking epidemic in the United States of America(2). In this report from a country who started all these measures far away from Romania, economic costs attributable to smoking and exposure to tobacco smoke still continue to increase and now approach $300 billion annually, with direct medical costs of at least $130 billion and productivity losses of more than $150 billion per year(2).

Overview of tobacco control politics in Romania