Denmark has drawn up a plan to become the first country in Europe to ban smoking for future generations, with a policy that would prevent anyone born in or after 2010 from legally buying cigarettes or other nicotine products such as vaping devices.
About a third of young Danes are smokers and there are roughly 13,500 deaths a year from smoking-related illnesses despite the country’s ambition to eliminate the habit in children and young people. There are also signs that the use of e-cigarettes is on the rise among 15 to 29-year-olds.
Under the new rules, the age threshold for obtaining any nicotine-based goods, which is currently 18, would be progressively raised so that no one who is under the age of 13 today would ever be able to legally buy them. Ministers also intend to abolish a law that allows 16 and 17-year-olds to buy drinks with a modest alcohol content such as beer and wine.
The nicotine proposal, which appears to have been inspired by a similar approach in New Zealand, has been broadly welcomed by Danish medical organisations.
However, it is regarded with scepticism or hostility by several opposition parties, which may complicate the Social Democratic minority government’s efforts to steer the bill through parliament.
Advertisement
Magnus Heunicke, 47, the health minister, said he hoped that “all people born in 2010 and afterwards will never start smoking or using nicotine-based products”.
Three months ago, New Zealand, which wants to reduce its smoking rate from 18 to 5 per cent by 2025, announced that it would ban the sale of tobacco to anyone born after 2008. It will also cancel more than 94 per cent of the licences for shops to sell products containing nicotine.
In recent years Ireland, Sweden and Finland have all published plans to become “smoke-free” by 2025 with measures that variously restrict smoking in public spaces, drive up the cost of cigarettes or intensify anti-smoking public health campaigns.
However, Denmark’s decision to go down the New Zealand route is not universally popular. Per Larsen, the health affairs spokesman for the opposition Conservative party, said the age cut-off was absurd.
“The state will say that if you’re 29 years old you can buy tobacco, but if you’re only 28, you can’t,” he told DR, the public broadcaster. “Once you come of age, you’re responsible for your own life and so you must be allowed to live the life you want.”
Advertisement
The centrist Social Liberals, another opposition party, aired similar concerns but said there was a need to “think creatively” about how to eliminate smoking in the next generation of Danes. It would prefer to add 50 per cent to the cost of a packet of cigarettes, as Norway and Iceland have done.
Responding to an ordinary Dane’s concern that the age cut-off was a quasi-communist “deprivation of liberty”, Lotus Sofie Bast, a researcher at the National Institute of Public Health, said it was primarily about protecting children against harmful habits that could last a lifetime.
“Perhaps it could also be considered a kind of deprivation of liberty to get addicted to nicotine at a young age when one is not yet able to make fully considered health choices,” she said.
