Indonesia Introduces Smoking Law

Indonesia has passed a law requiring cigarette packets to bear graphic photographic warnings.

AsianScientist (Jan. 14, 2013) – Anti-smoking activists in Indonesia have welcomed a new law requiring cigarette packets to bear graphic photographic warnings, a long-awaited measure in a country with one of the highest rates of smoking in the world.

“It’s long overdue, but it’s progress,” Hakim Sorimuda Pohan, a member of the National Commission on Tobacco Control, told IRIN on January 10.

Yesterday’s new law comes more than three years after parliament passed a bill listing tobacco as an addictive substance.

Tobacco farmers and cigarette companies have long opposed such a move, saying it threatened the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people who work in the industry.

According to the Health Ministry of Indonesia, with a population of 240 million, Indonesia ranks third in the world in terms of the number of smokers.

About 65 percent of Indonesian males and 35 percent of females aged 15 or older smoked in 2010, the ministry reported.

Non-communicable diseases – including smoking – account for 64 percent of all deaths in Indonesia, says the World Health Organization, up more than 50 percent on 1995. Companies have 18 months to comply with the new law.

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Source: IRIN; Photo: Ahmad Pathoni/IRIN.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.

IRIN was launched in 1995, in response to the gap in humanitarian reporting exposed by the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath. It is an editorially independent, non-profit project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), funded entirely by voluntary contributions from governments and other institutions. http://www.irinnews.org/

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