{"id":53084,"date":"2020-07-01T12:05:27","date_gmt":"2020-07-01T19:05:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=53084"},"modified":"2020-07-01T12:05:27","modified_gmt":"2020-07-01T19:05:27","slug":"why-educate-young-people-about-tobacco-marketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/why-educate-young-people-about-tobacco-marketing\/","title":{"rendered":"Why educate young people about tobacco marketing"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n33% of 15 year olds have already smoked cigarettes.\u00a0If the consumption levels of French adolescents have been falling in recent years, they remain\u00a0above the average<\/a>\u00a0of other European countries.\u00a0This trend is part of a context marked by a high consumption of adults which, even if it has also been decreasing since 2016, remains\u00a0particularly significant<\/a>\u00a0in France: 30% of people aged 18 to 75 smoke tobacco in 2019, compared to 15% in Great Britain and 14% in Australia for example.\u00a0And a particularly worrying observation, social inequalities relating to smoking take hold\u00a0at a very young age<\/a>\u00a0in our country.<\/p>\n

Tobacco is a product that triggers an addiction.\u00a0Knowing that 90% of smokers started before the age of 18, the main challenge is to develop the capacity of young people to keep their freedom from this product.\u00a0The role of all those in charge of children and young people is thus to ensure that the conditions for this freedom are created.\u00a0This requires both an ecosystem of life that protects young people, and a critical education that allows them to distance pressures of all kinds, especially those related to commercial interests.<\/p>\n

With this in mind, the World Health Organization (WHO) has just launched a campaign to give new generations the\u00a0means to identify<\/a>\u00a0the strategies used by the tobacco industry to get them to consume its products.\u00a0“Let us put an end to the exploitation of children and young people by the tobacco industry”, such is the title of this operation which deploys a set of educational tools.<\/p>\n

Promotion strategies<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Getting into tobacco consumption is a major issue for prevention, it is also a priority for marketing the tobacco industry.\u00a0Each year, these companies invest more than eight billion euros to promote their products.\u00a0The conflict between the profit maximization imperative and the health of the population is inevitable.<\/p>\n

We are talking about\u00a0commercial determinants<\/a>\u00a0of health, that is to say “strategies and approaches used by the private sector to promote products and choices that are harmful to health”.\u00a0These strategies use a variety of channels through which companies influence society as a whole, governments and consumers.<\/p>\n

Studies show that these strategies are extremely dynamic and that they constantly adapt to contexts.\u00a0The most recent example is that of the Covid-19 crisis.\u00a0Even if peer-reviewed journals tend to increase the\u00a0risk of developing<\/a>\u00a0a severe form of Covid-19 in smokers and remain cautious about\u00a0the association<\/a>\u00a0between Covid-19 and tobacco, there has been very effective promotion of a few preliminary work, conducted with a limited number of individuals, and suggesting a potential protective role for nicotine.<\/p>\n

Besides the approach of surfing the current distrust of scientific data, another strategy is particularly effective.\u00a0It is a question of making tobacco a moral stake and of public action in the matter of health a moralizing hygienism, a hunt for the\u00a0“good living”<\/a>\u00a0, an attack on the French art of living …<\/p>\n

Maintaining this amalgam skillfully allows us to maintain the consumption of tobacco products on the side of freedom, well-being, and the refusal of conformism, even though smoking tobacco is not a moral issue, it is neither good nor bad.\u00a0Consuming tobacco products is legal, smoking is therefore a matter of individual choice (subject to compliance with the law, in particular with regard to the ban on smoking in places used for collective use or the exposure of children).<\/p>\n

This confusion diverts from the main issue, that of the pressures that influence these choices, in particular the methods of control over adolescents.<\/p>\n

Social influence<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Young people are particularly vulnerable to addictive products like tobacco:<\/p>\n