Tobacco control and the climate emergency.
Malone RE. Editorial. Tobacco control and the climate emergency. Tobacco Control. Online 21 April 2022;31:395-396. “Even aside from the harms tobacco causes to human beings through production, product use, and secondhand smoke exposure, its impacts on the environment, throughout all phases of the life cycle of industrial production, are massive and far-reaching, constituting a threat to human development and environmental sustainability… We can combine our tobacco control work with environmental work, raising consciousness about tobacco’s environmental effects. We can work to counter the tobacco industry’s ‘greenwashing’ efforts, and harness the environmental awareness of young people to call out the waste and disutility of industrial tobacco at all stages. We can call for measures to phase out the sale of the most deadly products and those producing the most toxic waste.”
Comment: It is worth remembering that humans are a part of nature, not uniquely separated from the ‘environment’. It is just now being recognized that destroying the environment is destroying ourselves. Companies that degrade life with their products and waste need to be abolished if the environment is to be sustained. https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/31/3/395
Stephen Hamann
