TIRANA, June 1 – A decade after the introduction of smoking ban, Albania has considerably cut smoking in public areas, but anecdotal evidence suggests the law banning smoking in enclosed public spaces is mostly enforced in downtown areas where the night hours often turn into smoking areas and largely ignored in suburban and rural areas.
The law which has been effective since May 2007 had been largely ignored for seven years until 2014 when some amendments increased fines by 6-fold to 300,000 lek (€2,214) for coffer bar, restaurant and club owners allowing their customers to smoke in enclosed facilities, a tough penalty for Albanian standards, while smokers themselves also faced the risk of a 5,000 lek (€37).
A series of nationwide campaigns and tough penalties made smoking in public spaces an almost rare phenomenon in downtown public spaces until 2015, but with the 2016 focus being on fighting informality and 2017 being an electoral year, authorities are apparently being more tolerant of enforcing the law although the State Health Inspectorate reports more than 80 fines were imposed to coffee bars around the country in the first quarter of this year.
On the World No Tobacco Day this week, health authorities underlined the need for support mechanism to help smokers quit.
“We still don’t have a support system for people seeking help to quit smoking. We don’t even have a warning system about smoking-related risks and I don’t mean sporadic posters with this,” said new Health Minister Arben Beqiri.
The health minister was one of the six caretaker minister proposed by the opposition Democratic Party last month as part of a deal with the ruling Socialists to handle the upcoming June 25 general elections smoothly.
World Health Organization Albania representative Nazira Poolatovna also warned how tobacco can be a threat to development, the theme of this year’s World No Tobacco Day, marked every May 31, with an impact households and the environment.
According to the WHO, tobacco use kills more than 7 million people worldwide every year and costs households and governments over US$ 1.4 trillion through healthcare expenditure and lost productivity.
Albania has a smoking rate of 27 percent, one of Europe’s highest, with about 43 percent of men and 11 percent of women being regular smokers. Some 3,300 people a year are estimated to die of smoking-related diseases.
The World Health Organization has warned that based on the current level of adult smoking in Albania, premature deaths attributable to smoking are projected to be as high as 399,000 of the 798,000 smokers alive today and may increase in the absence of stronger policies.
The WHO says Albania can reduce smoking by about a quarter by increasing the current excise rate on cigarettes from 45 percent of the final price to 75 percent and even more though better media and awareness campaigns including introducing strong graphic health warnings to tobacco products.
The Albanian government has regularly raised the excise rate on tobacco during the past few years but dropped plans for a new hike in the past couple of years following a sharp decline in imports affecting government revenue.
The excise rate on a 20-cigarette packs currently stands at 110 lek (€0.77) while retail prices for the most popular brands range from 200 lek to 300 lek (€1.4 to 2.1) per packet.
Albanians are estimated to spend more than 300 million euros on tobacco products every year.
Cigarette imports have suffered drastic decline in the past five years due to sharp hikes in excise duty, making prices unaffordable for thousands of smokers who have mostly shifted to domestic hand-rolled tobacco. Tobacco importers say there has been a shift toward hand-rolled unprocessed tobacco which is mainly sold on the black market and mostly produced in the mountain areas in the northern region of Shkodra and the central Albanian region of Elbasan.
Last year, authorities said Albania was planning to make pictorial health warnings on cigarettes packs compulsory starting January 2018 in new measures to curb high smoking rates after consecutive tax hikes have already had a discouraging effect.
