The Australian government should sue the tobacco industry after landmark research found Australian smokers have a three times greater chance of dying today than a lifelong non-smoker, the president of the Australian Council on Smoking and Health says.
Up to 1.8m of Australia’s 2.7m smokers are likely to die from their habit if they continue to smoke, losing an average of 10 years of life expectancy, the first Australian large-scale study on smoking and mortality, published in the international journal BMC Medicine, found.
The study findings highlighted the extreme hazards faced by the 13% of Australians who smoked, an author of the study and director of the University of Melbourne’s global burden of disease group, Professor Alan Lopez, said.
“Australia still has a smoking problem,” he said. “Saying Australians are getting fatter, and shifting the focus towards diet and obesity should not mean we forget about tobacco, which is still a major public health problem.”
The research was led by Sydney’s Sax Institute using data from their 45 and Up study. Researchers linked health information from 204,953 study participants aged 45 and over from NSW, with data from the register of births, deaths and marriages.
Previous research from the Sax Institute found pack-a-day smokers had a fourfold risk of dying early, while the risk of death for lighter smokers was more than doubled.
The president of the Australian Council on Smoking and Health, Mike Daube, said the study revealed smoking as a “national catastrophe” because even though Australia had among the lowest smoking rates in the word, its effects were widespread.
“That smoking will kill 7.5% of Australians means it deserves a massively increased focus, and we need to keep increasing taxes on tobacco, step up public health campaigns and limit the number of outlets that sell it,” Daube said.
“It is time for the Australian government to follow what the US did about 20 years ago and sue the tobacco industry for costs incurred because of smoking, and force them to make internal documents public.
“That would bring in tens of billions of dollars which would help the budget, and enable stronger action on smoking.”
Known as the Master Settlement Agreement, the 1998 court action involved 46 US states and several of the largest US tobacco companies. The tobacco industry was forced to pay the states more than US$200bn in compensation and make public previously secret documents.
The chief executive of the Public Health Association of Australia, Michael Moore, said the research confirmed smoking as Australia’s most preventable cause of death and disease, killing even more people than previously believed.
It meant politicians and policymakers must do “everything possible” to encourage smokers to quit, he said.
“We cannot stand by and see yet more generations of Australians dying, often painful deaths, because they smoked,” he said.
“Public health leaders campaign on smoking not because of any moral fervour, but because it kills people. Now we know that it kills even more than we had thought. That is cause for deep concern and a call for strengthened action.”