Thank you for making the time to hear more about this petition. If Professor Colin has been unavoidably delayed, he will be able to send further information to you later, if you need it.
Scotland has a proud record of tackling tobacco. It is hard for me to believe that next year it will be 10 years since Scotland implemented smoke-free public places.
I would like us to take a moment to remember what tobacco is. It is widely available, with eight tobacco retail outlets for every pharmacy in Scotland, which means that it is easier to buy poison than medicine. It is addictive and dependency forming, and engineered by tobacco companies to be as highly so as possible. Tobacco use is primarily a childhood addiction, not an adult choice. It is lethal to at least one in two—recent research suggests as many as two in three—consumers when used in the long term in accordance with the manufacturer’s intentions. Tobacco is estimated to be responsible for around a quarter of the adult deaths that are recorded in Scotland every year, which represents some 13,000 lives lost early. Behind each death, it is likely that there are more than 20 people living with chronic and disabling disease caused by tobacco.
This is a major and largely hidden epidemic. It is a commercially driven epidemic. It is driven by an industry with a long and well-documented history of denial, delay and deceit with regard to health measures, and one that has demonstrated that its main interests lie with its profits.
Because the tobacco industry is a worldwide predator, the World Health Organization developed the first and only international public health treaty, the framework convention on tobacco control, which has 180 signatories, including the United Kingdom and the European Union and which covers 90 per cent of the world’s population. The treaty requires parties to introduce broad-brush measures to try to reduce the harm that is caused by tobacco. We already have some of them, such as tobacco tax, smoke-free enclosed spaces and curbs on tobacco advertising. However, this petition relates to article 5.3 of the convention, which says:
“In setting and implementing their public health policies with respect to tobacco control, Parties shall act to protect these policies from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry”.
That could be quite a wide instruction but, fortunately, the conference of parties developed further detailed guidance about how that article could and should be implemented. One example of the kind of thing that is in that guidance is the recommendation that
“Parties should interact with the tobacco industry only when and to the extent strictly necessary to enable them to effectively regulate the tobacco industry and tobacco products.”
I believe that we need to raise awareness of the treaty in Parliament, because there have been recent actions—unknowingly committed—that have gone against our obligations under the treaty. The point of the petition is to ask Parliament to consider the international treaty and its article 5.3, to think about Scotland’s obligations under it and to develop guidance for parliamentary staff to ensure that we meet those obligations.