Tobacco Smoking and Cessation in France
The French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction has carried out its annual tobacco overview.
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by Dave Cross
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The overview by the French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) collates the changes over the previous year. The document looks at key indicators on tobacco, sales of cessation products and the use of quit-tobacco services.
During 2017, France introduced plain packaging and continued its #MoisSansTabac campaign into a second year – taking its inspiration from the Britain’s successful Stoptober.
Despite the authors claiming that a decline in sales continued year-on-year, “The downward trend in official tobacco sales observed in 2016 has been confirmed in 2017”, the actual figures are nothing to shout about: “Tobacco sales in the tobacconist retailer network in mainland France reached 54,525 tonnes in 2017 compared to 55,728 tonnes in 2016, i.e. a 1.4% reduction on a same-day basis. Cigarette sales (80% of the market with 44,261 tonnes) fell by 0.7% on a same-day basis.”
Sales of patches and Champix® have doubled since the nation introduced a smokers’ refund of up to €150 – which must make the French pharmaceutical industry happy. What will make them happier still is the news that 29% of the population still smoke, and this figure hasn’t dropped since 2014. If those responsible for public health in France were being honest they’d have to ask themselves if they could make more progress by adopting vaping.
Spotlight on electronic cigarettes
“At the end of 2017, the number of specialist stores in France reached 2,614, i.e. approximately 5% more compared to 2016 (source: PGVG magazine). Following its exponential growth between 2012 and 2014, the e-cigarette market has thus appeared to stabilise since 2015, although it is still difficult to monitor all sales in this sector, which include online purchases.
In 2016, 3.3% of French people aged 15 to 75 years used electronic cigarettes, 2.5% on a daily basis. These proportions have fallen compared to 2014 (5.9% and 2.9%, respectively). Three quarters of vapers are daily users (compared to half in 2014) and 41.2% are former smokers (compared to 23.1% three years previously).
“Daily vaping is very rare: this concerns barely 2% of 17-year-olds in 2017”
Among 17-year-olds, in 2017, 52.4% claimed to have already used an e-cigarette at some point in their lives, hence, only slightly lower than in 2014 (53.3%). However, electronic cigarette use has mainly remained occasional: 34.9% of lifetime users tried it only once, and last-month vaping concerns fewer adolescents compared to 2014 (16.8% versus 22.1%). Daily vaping is very rare: this concerns barely 2% of 17-year-olds in 2017.”
Correlation is not causation, but it’s hard to ignore a link between the initial boom in the electronic cigarette market and the big drops in tobacco sales – and then the clamp down on vaping (leading up to the implementation of the Tobacco Products Directive) as tobacco sales ceased dropping in a marked fashion and the numbers quitting smoking stopped increasing.
Until France embraces the consumer-driven technology that is working so well in Britain it’s going to be a case of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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