Agusan del Norte rep wants ban on tobacco ads, promo

Agusan del Norte First District Rep. Lawrence “Law” Fortun filed House Bill 4713, seeking to institutionalize a comprehensive ban on all forms of tobacco advertising, promotions and sponsorships (TAPS) in the country.

The said bill seeks to prohibit the placing, posting, or displaying tobacco advertisements and promotion items including tobacco products in any place including point of sale sites except for the placement of a simple sign informing consumers of the availability of the tobacco products therein.

In his explanatory note, Fortun emphasized the enormous toll of death, disease and disability caused by tobacco addiction as a global epidemic. Citing reports by the World Health Organization (WHO), the solon emphasized that battling this epidemic “should be an urgent concern especially in the developing countries, where 80% of the world’s smokers come from. In the Philippines, an estimated 87,600 Filipinos die every year due to tobaccoelated illness, or 240 Filipinos daily.”

In 2003, the Philippines signed and ratified the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the world’s first public health treaty which aims to address the global tobacco epidemic and provide protection to the world’s population against the health hazards of tobacco use. Article 13.1 of the FCTC contains an explicit recognition that “a comprehensive ban on advertising, promotion and sponsorship would reduce the consumption of tobacco products.”

By imposing a comprehensive ban on TAPS, the legislative measure targets to reduce the tobacco addiction in the country. “TAPS activities project an image of success fun and glamour to tobacco products that lure new users, especially the youth, into a lifetime of addiction. These deceive consumers into believing that tobacco is an ordinary consumer product, and not one that kills half of its regular uses when used exactly as the manufacturer intended,” Fortun explained. (pr)