RUSSIA Deputy Head of the Russian Ministry of Health Oleg Salagai (far right) has been one of the most hostile Russian leaders in relation to tobacco.
Regulation Gets Ratcheted Up on Russian Tobacco Eventual goal: elimination of tobacco products after 2050. By Eugene Gerden, TI Russian Correspondent he Russian government is tightening pressure on the domestic tobacco business by way of the introduction of new restrictions on smoking and tobacco. In the recently prepared State Concept for the fight with tobacco consumption in Russia during the period 2019–2035, producers and some senior experts in the field of tobacco business in Russia brought their opinions to the attention of the public. The new State Concept will be also part of the recently announced plans of the Russian Ministry of Health to completely withdraw tobacco products from the Russian market after 2050. By 2030, the share of consumption of tobacco products among the Russian population should fall to five percent and to zero percent by 2050, according to recent statements of the deputy head of the Ministry of Health Oleg Salagai.
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As part of the new Concept, the government plans to extend the ban on smoking in public places, to increase minimal prices for cigarettes and to equate electronic cigarettes with ordinary ones. T he gover n ment bel ie ve s t he planned restrictive measures could be efficient as those contained in the previous anti-tobacco Concept, which
Measures implemented To date, some of the proposed measures have already been implemented. For example, on March 1, 2019, mandatory digital labeling of tobacco products officially came into force in Russia. The main purpose was to raise the transparency of the Russian tobacco market and reduce the share of counterfeit. The new labeling scheme involves putting digitally generated code (electronic two-dimensional dot code in Data Matrix format) on a pack of cigarettes, using special tools. The new code will allow tracing the path of the pack from the manufacturer to the consumer. That will help regulators get an access to information about producers and their products. At present, the high share of counterfeit continues to be one of the major problems of the Russian tobacco market. According to Nielsen data, during the period from 2015 to 2018 the share of the illegal segment grew by eight times and is currently estimated at 10 percent of the overall structure of the market. As a rule, most counterfeit tobacco comes to Russia from the countries of the former-Soviet-Union, primarily Belarus.
So far, all the economic measures to combat smoking in Russia have led only to an increase of the illegal sector of the market. came into force at the beginning of 2010s and resulted in the decline of the share of smokers in Russia from 39.4 percent to 30.9 percent. At the same time, in the case teenagers aged of 13–15 years, these figures fell by two times.
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Experts question In the meantime, implementation of such ambitious plans as those which were announced by the state in the proposed State Concept have already been questioned by some leading Russian experts in the field of tobacco business.
