Smoking in New Zealand
In New Zealand, smoking is legal but subject to tobacco control regulations. Cigarettes are regulated as tobacco products and can be sold through retail outlets, including online sales and vending machines. The importation of cigarettes for trade is allowed with a trade license. Health warnings on packaging are mandatory, the legal minimum age for purchase is 18 years, and smoking in public places is subject to legal restrictions. A comprehensive ban on tobacco advertising is also in place. Cigarettes in New Zealand are taxed at a total rate of 82.78%, including an excise component of 69.74%. Data show that in 2024, the number of current smokers was recorded to be approximately 364,000 in New Zealand, corresponding to an adult smoking prevalence of 8.6%. In the same year, current smoking prevalence was slightly higher among males (9.7%) than among females (7.7%). In 2022, this prevalence was recorded to be 11.4%. In 2023, the adult daily tobacco smoking prevalence was reported to be 7.7%, with approximately 362,845 daily smokers. In 2021, smoking led to approximately 3,580 deaths in New Zealand, including 2,085 deaths among males and 1,495 deaths among females. In other words, tobacco smoking accounted for 10.38% of all deaths in the country in 2021, including11.78% of all male deaths and 8.9% of all female deaths.
Read articles from New Zealand
December 09, 2021 by health.govt.nz
Smokefree Aotearoa 2025 Action Plan
The culmination of many years of hard mahi, the plan will accelerate our progress towards a smokefree future and tackle the harm smoked tobacco products cause the people of New Zealand.
Many organisations, services, advocates, academics, researchers, community champions, individuals and whānau have played an important part in getting us here.
While smoking rates are heading in the right direction, we still have more work to do. We must move away from a business-as-usual approach and try something new. No one single intervention will help us to achieve a smokefree 2025. It will take a multi-faceted approach and evidence-based measures to stamp out smoking.
November 25, 2021 by scoop.co.nz
Smokefree Cars - One Step Closer To Smokefree 2025
On Sunday 28 November any car carrying people under the age of 18 must be smokefree.
Smokefree cars are yet another step in the move to achieve the Smokefree 2025 goal. New Zealand continues to have some of the most advanced smokefree policies in the world. Other recent steps taken have included plain packaging of cigarettes, a retail display ban, and progressive vaping legislation that supports vaping use as a quit smoking tool. The smokefree cars ban will greatly diminish the health hazard of second-hand smoke while young people are in cars.
October 20, 2021 by thespinoff.co.nz
Make cigarettes nicotine-free and we’ll stub out smoking for good
A game-changing move to make cigarettes non-addictive will be a decisive nail in the coffin of smoking harm in New Zealand, write professors of public health Richard Edwards and Chris Bullen.
Big tobacco has long known it is in the nicotine delivery business. The addictive substance grabs new customers and ensures they get trapped in a purchasing loop even as ill-health takes hold.
Associate minister of health Ayesha Verrall’s Smokefree Action Plan sets to change that by making New Zealand the first country to slash nicotine levels in cigarettes.
October 19, 2021 by medicalxpress.com
Vaping with nicotine more common than smoking among NZ teens
More than a third of New Zealand high school students have tried vaping, with 10 percent vaping regularly and six percent vaping weekly or more often, researchers have found. The study [...] reflects the situation before the Government banned the sale of vaping products to under 18-year-olds and prohibited e-cigarette marketing late last year.
Researcher Dr. Jude Ball, from the University of Otago, Wellington, says the study highlights the importance of getting the balance right between making it easy for adult smokers to switch to less harmful vaping, while protecting young non-smokers.
October 08, 2021 by scoop.co.nz
New Survey Reveals WHO At Odds With Kiwi Vapers
More than two thirds of vapers believe New Zealand’s approach to vaping as a tobacco harm reduction tool is world-leading and should be promoted overseas to save millions of lives, according to a new survey conducted by research house IRI.
The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union has released this research an anticipation of the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control Conference (COP9) this November.
The IRI survey, conducted in September, asked more than 500 Kiwi vapers what they thought of New Zealand’s use of vaping as a tool to help smokers quit. Over 80 per cent said vaping had helped them to reduce or quit smoking. [...]
September 24, 2021 by vapingpost.com
Kiwi Expert: Low Nicotine Cigs Will Just Make Smokers Consume More
ACT Social Development and Children spokesperson Karen Chhou, said that having only low nicotine cigarettes available on the market only pushes smokers to consume more and therefore spend more on their habit, also leading to an increase in poverty. As part of the proposals put forward by the Kiwi government aiming to make New Zealand Smokefree by 2025, the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Vaping) Amendment Bill, limits the amount of nicotine in e-cigarettes to 20 mg/mL and 50 mg/mL for freebase nicotine, whilst setting the local tobacco age limit at 18.
September 15, 2021 by odt.co.nz
World-leading action plan on smoking will reduce harm
Public health practitioners are used to frustration and disappointment. Until recently, calls to introduce evidence-based interventions to improve health, such as sugary drink taxes and controls on alcohol marketing, have been mostly ignored or have foundered due to political timidity in the face of lobbying by powerful vested interests. Public health gains have mostly been modest and infrequent.
However, it seems the times may be changing. [...] Associate Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall has proposed a plan to achieve the Smokefree Aotearoa goal of having minimal numbers of New Zealanders smoking by 2025. [...]
September 01, 2021 by filtermag.org
As New Zealand Cigarette Taxes Climb, So Do Harms to Poor and Indigenous Smokers
When it comes to taxing cigarettes, there’s rarely any opposition from lawmakers. “Sin taxes,” as they’re sometimes called, raise significant revenue for governments and are broadly deployed in the name of reducing rates of smoking—in the US, they’re particularly high in states like New York and Connecticut. But rarely is the effect of these taxes studied on marginalized people with low incomes, who around the world smoke at the highest rates.
June 30, 2021 by thespinoff.co.nz
Achieving Smokefree 2025 goal will be costly. The alternative is much costlier
We have had the 2025 goal since 2011 but are not currently on track. A boost in funding and commitment is required, writes public health expert Robert Beaglehole.
Colin still haunts me. He was the first hospital patient I talked with as a young medical student in Dunedin in 1965. He was coughing blood from lung cancer caused by his long history of cigarette smoking. I was shocked and powerless; treatment of advanced lung cancer, then as now, is mainly palliative. Along with many other personal experiences of the uniquely harmful effects of cigarettes, my passion for a smokefree country led to the formation of ASH, Action for Smoking and Health, in 1982.
June 18, 2021 by nzherald.co.nz
Cigarette poverty: Kiwi smokers reusing 'horrible' tobacco as prices soar
New Zealand's war on tobacco and its ill-fated smoke-free goal for 2025 is causing poorer Kiwi smokers more harm than good.
With the country's tobacco prices second only to Australia's as the most expensive in the world, the most vulnerable in society are resorting to reusing tobacco that has already been smoked.
As most reused tobacco is left at the very end of the cigarette, it will have already been contaminated further by the toxins in the smoke that attach to the unsmoked tobacco.