Turkmenistan Cracks Down on Smokers
Turkmenistan Cracks Down on Smokers
Cigarettes vanished from Turkmenistan’s shop shelves last month, only to reappear at highly inflated prices, as the government launched a campaign to cut down on smoking.
President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov signed off on a five-year plan to reduce smoking in early January, but local analysts warn that previous efforts have been less than effective.
Although cigarettes disappeared from the shops, they were back on sale by the end of January, now for around 10 US dollars a pack instead of around 3.50 dollars.
Despite the price hike, one student told IWPR he had no plans to quit as the decision needed to be a personal one rather than the result of external pressure.
“Why would someone quit smoking if he doesn’t have the motivation to do so?” he said.
He suggested that the authorities could run a media campaign highlighting the decline of smoking in wealthier countries, but acknowledged that this was unlikely to happen.
In the absence of publicly-available statistics, no one really knows how many people smoke in Turkmenistan, but an editorial distributed in the state-controlled media spoke of a “tobacco epidemic”.
One doctor in the southeast of the country told IWPR that nearly all his patients seemed to be nicotine addicts. Some of them chew a traditional mix of tobacco, lime and ashes, which he said could cause mouth or digestive tract cancer.
This is not the first time the Turkmen authorities have tried to extinguish the habit. The government banned smoking in all public places in 2000. Other measures included a ban on advertising, healthwarnings on packets, turning universities into “smoke-free zones”, and fines for offenders.
However, the campaign ultimately proved counterproductive, one local observer told IWPR.
“People in the regions started secretly planting and selling makhorka [low-grade tobacco] and smoking hay or tealeaves,” he said. “The number of smokers actually increased.”
This article was produced as part of IWPR’s News Briefing Central Asia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.
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