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KMID : 1138720150410030001
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Korean Public Health Research
2015 Volume.41 No. 3 p.1 ~ p.21
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Tobacco Harm Reduction : Its Health Policy Implication
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Moon Ok-Ryun
Kim Kong-Hyun
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Abstract
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In 2012, World Health Organization reported that tobacco is the only legal drug in the world at present, even though it does annually kill about 6 million people among 1 billion tobacco smokers. Most of smokers wish to quit tobacco smoking, however, permanent successors in quitting are only a few. And the current efforts preventing initiative smoking are also not so effective. If this trend would continue, persons dying of tobacco smoking will be globally increased to over 8 million per year in two decades. How could we cope with the global troublesome preventable tobacco epidemic? In order effectively to respond to it, World Health Organization developed and adopted “WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FTCT)”, which is the first treaty negotiated under the auspices of WHO, on June 2003 and entered intoforce on February 2005. In 2014, signatories of FCTC reached to 180 Member States of WHO. In FCTC, World Health Organization recommends Parties three strategies to control tobacco epidemic; they are supply, demand, and harm reduction strategies, however, there are few articles concerning the last strategy, harm reduction in FCTC. When we emphasize only both supply and demand strategies for controling tobacco use, smokers could not but select unpleasant and unwilling alternative of either quitting or suffering from the harm effects of continuing smoking. In this context, smokers should have a third choice which is more pragmatic and realistic for both overcoming tobacco nicotine addiction and reducing harms from tobacco use. The third choice is called “tobacco harm reduction”. In this paper, we will, at first, review various tobacco control strategies based on FCTC and issues on harm reduction; the third tobacco control strategy which is simply existent in FCTC. After that, the efficacy of the Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems(ENDS) or E-Cigarettes will be examined as a device for the tobacco harm reduction which may help smokers quit smoking or reduce harms from tobacco use. Based on the review and examination, we would suggest health policy makers tobacco harm reduction strategies which might be implemented in Korea.
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KEYWORD
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Tobacco harm reduction, Tobacco control, FCTC, Tobacco epidemic
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