TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The cigarette industry never seem to run out of ways to promote its products. They try everything, including sneaking in articles inside a draft legislation. The most recent example is the sudden inclusion of a provision to preserve the culture of clove, or kretek, cigarettes in a bill on culture. This laughable article should be deleted. No normal country passes laws obliging the government to preserve or even spread the tradition of smoking.
Look at how the bill openly promotes kretek cigarettes. It refers to them as 'cultural heritage' that must be preserved. The clarification of article 49 requires the government to make an inventory, develop traditional kretek cigarettes and promote them. The government is even obliged to organize a kretek festival and protect it.
This is not the first time the cigarette industry has tried to manipulate the law for its benefit. In 2009, there was a row when the House of Representatives (DPR) completed its deliberations of the health bill because an article stating that tobacco was an addictive substance suddenly disappeared, despite the bill having been ratified in a plenary session. It turned out that the article had vanished when the final draft of the bill was sent to the government for ratification. Fortunately the deletion was discovered.
Unwilling to give up, they tried again using a different tack. In 2013, the DPR suddenly added the tobacco bill to the list of priorities to be deliberated. This was strange because discussions of the bill had not been on the agenda. After a public outcry, the bill, which was mostly concerned with protecting the interests of the tobacco industry, was put on hold.
At the beginning of this year, the DPR tried to revive it.
It is easy to imagine what will happen if the culture bill containing the kretek article and the tobacco bill are passed into law. Cigarette sales will increase. Because kretek cigarettes contain tobacco, they are addictive. And the addictive substance, through cigarettes, is a weapon of mass destruction. According to a WHO report, in 2010 alone, 190,260 people in Indonesia died as a result of smoking. This means 500 people every single day!
This death rate will increase because the number of smokers continues to rise. The same WHO report stated that smokers in Indonesia comprise 36 percent of the population, or around 60 million people. Without serious measures, this will increase to 90 million by 2025. Tragically, 19 percent of smokers are aged between 13 and 15 years of age. They are the most vulnerable people because they are tempted by the apparent pleasures of smoking.
These figures clearly show that the distribution of cigarettes must be restricted. Promoting kretek, even if it is presented as Indonesian culture, must be stopped. If this bill is passed, it will mean the DPR provides a legal means of committing mass murder. Even without this promotion, consumption in Indonesia has reached 350 billion cigarettes per year the third highest in the world.
There is no alternative: the government must be more serious about limiting cigarette distribution. The regulations concerning the ban on smoking in public, sales restrictions and high taxes on cigarettes must be enforced. The government must immediately ratify the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which has been signed by 177 nations. In this way, Indonesia would be bound by international rules that set limits on the distribution of tobacco products. (*)
