On World No Tobacco Day, the World Health Organization (WHO), a Geneva-based UN agency, Saturday called on governments to urgently ban all flavours in tobacco and nicotine products, including cigarettes, pouches, hookahs and e-cigarettes, to protect youth from addiction and disease.
Flavoured nicotine and tobacco products are inherently addictive and toxic – often more so than regular tobacco, WHO maintains, adding that flavours increase usage, make quitting harder, and have been linked to serious lung diseases, WHO maintains.
Despite decades of progress in tobacco control, flavoured products are luring a new generation into addiction and contributing to eight million tobacco-related deaths each year.
Nicotine products are often marketed directly toward young people through bright and colourful packaging featuring sweet and fruity flavour descriptors.
Research shows that this type of advertising can trigger reward centres in adolescent brains and weaken the impact of health warnings.
Young people also report a growing presence of flavoured nicotine product marketing across all social media platforms.
This marketing of flavours works across all forms of nicotine and tobacco products, including cigarettes, e-cigarettes, cigars, pouches and hookahs.
WHO said flavours such as menthol, bubble gum and cotton candy, are “masking the harshness of tobacco” and other nicotine products, turning what are toxic products “into youth-friendly bait.”
Just ahead of World No Tobacco Day, the UN health agency released a series of fact sheets and called on governments to ban all flavours in tobacco and nicotine products to protect young people from lifelong addiction and disease.
It cited Articles 9 and 10 of the successful 2003 Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which obliges countries to regulate the contents and disclosure of tobacco products, including flavourings.