Dear Editor,

Following the impressive news that Jamaica has been chosen to the presidency of the 2022-2023 executive committee of multinational public health agency, the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), I came across an op-ed, published on October 9, 2022 in The Sunday Gleaner, titled ‘Jamaica should adopt Tobacco Control Bill to save lives’ by Patricia Sosa, regional advocacy director for Latin America & the Caribbean at the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, and PAHO/World Health Organization (WHO) Representative in Jamaica Ian Stein.

This joint column piqued my interest as I have been keeping abreast of the progress and discussions around the Tobacco Control Act, 2020 which was tabled by the current Minister of Health and Wellness Dr Christopher Tufton back in December 2020.

Not unlike Sosa and Stein, Dr Tufton has also used said newspapers to propel an agenda of prohibition with regard to conventional tobacco smoking and vaping. It is not lost on me that the prerogative of a presiding Cabinet minister is to steer policy, but given Dr Tufton’s increasingly expansive résumé, where does his sense of duty really lie?

When Minister Tufton first unveiled his primordial prevention scheme I read that he had the full support of the already regulated tobacco industry. But what was originally thought to be a welcome approach in lifestyle moderation appears to have now taken on extremist tendencies with the tobacco industry being singled out as the scheme’s sacrificial lamb.

In a world ever rife with personal, social, and economic stressors — not to mention a lingering pandemic — people turn to accessible creature comforts and merriment for obvious relief, as they always do, and always have. And seeing that our individual experiences cannot be glibly dismissed as a monolith then why does the Ministry of Health and Wellness appear to be minimising the lives of the Jamaican populace to a cost-burden ratio?

Risk reduction is nothing to scoff at, I agree, but the complete eradication of voluntary or involuntary risk feels disturbingly Orwellian in nature. Furthermore, Dr Tufton, through his own publicity machinery, has fashioned himself as a messianic figure who would have us believe that he is void of vice, coupled with a high-handed intolerance for any point of view that falls short of his sanitised view of the world.

Whether it is the health minister’s intention or not, his continued rhetoric implies that the island’s leading tobacco purveyor, Carreras — the 60-year-old home-grown company that benefits from foreign investment like many of its publicly-traded corporate peers and is the founding maker of iconic Jamaican brands Craven ‘A’ and Matterhorn — is an organisation trafficking in contraband. So much so, PAHO is unusually represented at the joint select committee meetings on the aforementioned ministry-sponsored Bill in what can only be seen as a de facto advisory role.

To boot, Dr Tufton, as committee chair, has led the esteemed members of his joint select committee down a path whereby two mutually exclusive product portfolios have been conflated into a single framework of legislation, namely vaping and tobacco smoking.

Vaping is still an emerging innovation and does not possess an extensive level of research as, say, tobacco, so how can it be subject to the same regulation? It’s apples and oranges. Surely, the minister appreciates the tumultuous journey cannabis — a now-licensed product — has undergone. Once vilified, marijuana is today revered for its long-upheld medicinal qualities and recreational appeal.

If this Tobacco Control Act 2020 is prematurely rushed, then, regrettably, the Administration will have yet another case on its hands.

Calista Browne

calista.browne@yahoo.com