The 20 week sales ban on tobacco products, introduced by the government in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, did not have the intended objective of encouraging large-scale smoking cessation.
A UCT study, published in the Tobacco Induced Diseases journal, found that 7.8% of smokers quit during the ban, but 55% of them relapsed after it was lifted.
Of the pre-ban smokers, 3.5% indicated that they did not smoke during and after the sales ban, and 3.7% quit after the ban was lifted.
The study, by Professor Corné Van Walbeek, Robert Hill and Samantha Filby, based at UCT’s School of Economics, used data from wave three of the National Income Dynamics Study-Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (NIDS-CRAM) conducted in November–December 2020.
They first investigated the proportion of people who quit and who continued smoking during and after the sales ban. They also linked the NIDS-CRAM survey to the fifth wave of NIDS (2017) to identify a subset of established smokers and considered whether their quitting behaviour differed from that of all smokers who smoked at the start of the sales ban.
The analysis showed that 7% of people who were smoking in 2017 quit cigarettes during the tobacco sales ban, but 70% of quitters relapsed after it was lifted. Only 2% of pre-ban established smokers indicated they did not smoke during or after the ban.
Van Walbeek, the director of the Research Unit on the Economics of Excisable Products and lead author, said: “Before the sales ban was implemented in South Africa, the country already struggled with high levels of illicit trade. Illicit market channels were well-established in the informal market. The sales ban was very effective in shutting down formal retailers as a channel through which smokers could purchase cigarettes. However, the ban proved a boon to informal tobacco outlets, which were able to sell increased quantities of cigarettes at highly inflated prices to desperate smokers.
“With the benefit of hindsight, one can argue that the sales ban was misguided. Yet, in the early days of the pandemic, there were huge uncertainties. The South African government’s precautionary approach thus makes sense. However, the extension of the sales ban beyond the first five weeks of the lockdown seems unjustified.”
Van Walbeek added that the tobacco sales ban was implemented in a stressful period which would have made it more difficult for the average smoker to quit.
“The fact that cessation support in South Africa is limited and that the government did not provide smokers with any information on how to quit smoking during the ban are policy failures that may explain the low quitting rates of South African smokers in response to the sales ban.”
Cape Times