At Erasmus University Rotterdam, there appears to be a gap in the official rule about smoking on campus. This environmental pollution from littered butts is an indicator of both the environmental and health costs of smoking. Right behind the building where I work, I found thousands of cigarette butts two years after all universities in the Netherlands were supposed to have gone smokefree.
So what’s going on? Is this just a matter of poor enforcement? Or is this a matter of insufficient norm change? Our taxes on cigarettes too low? Are antitobacco countermarketing messages simply absent or not enough?
Why are smoking rates in the Netherlands still so high even after some recent bold policy innovations? Which branches of the government are still complacent and protecting the tobacco industry allowing tens of thousands of Dutch to die every year from smoking- related illnesses?
We all know that cigarettes serve no social function and people only smoke (as a way of self-medicating) because of slick marketing in our movies and other media by the industry. And obviously it seems as if the environmental consequences of smoking have also failed to reach young people on this salient point. Here countermarketing could be a successful tactic as has been used in other places like California, where the smoking incidence is less than 8%. Tax cigarettes additionally in order to denormalize them with slick countermarketing. Let people know about the environmental and health costs of cigarettes.
Also, ban the butt – filters provide absolutely no health benefits, but were part of the ‘filter fraud’ created in the 1950s to placate people’s worries that cigarettes were causing cancer. They are a cosmetic accoutrement, nothing else – and yet, because they are made of cellulose acetate, they don’t break down, but persist in our environments, hurting birds, fish, children and other animals who eat them.