Now, anti-smoking groups have set their eyes on an even bigger change of lifestyle — to rid the country of tobacco totally in 10 years’ time.

“Smoking continues to kill 5,000 people a year in New Zealand, and there is no sign of this abating,” said Ben Youdan, director of the lobby group ASH.

“After years of slow progress it’s time for a more radical approach to dealing with this killer.”

Mark Peck, director of the Smokefree Coalition said, “New Zealand has banned tobacco advertising, declared indoor places smoke-free and committed tens of millions of dollars towards helping smokers quit. The stage is set for the final curtain.”

About one-in-two Maoris, New Zealand’s indigenous people, smoke, making them among the biggest tobacco users in the world per head of population.

They had no history of using tobacco before European settlement began in the mid-19th century and Shane Bradbrook, director of the Maori smoke-free lobby group Te Reo Marama, said, “We are determined to drive this colonial scourge from our marae (meeting places).”

These three organizations combined at a conference in Auckland this month to urge politicians to phase-out tobacco gradually over the next 10 years.

They claim that even the majority of the country’s 750,000 smokers would support them because surveys show that two-thirds of people smoking want to quit but have not been able to.

The group proposed an initial raft of policies including doubling the cost of cigarettes through tax increases and using the revenue to expand and improve quit programmes, removing all retail displays of tobacco and allowing cigarettes to be sold only in plain packages before phasing out sales completely, and promoting more alternative and safer forms of nicotine to cigarettes, like chewing tobacco.

One speaker at the Oceania Tobacco Control conference, Chris Cunningham, of Massey University, said chewing tobacco or Snus, was controversial but might be the answer for hard core, long-term, smokers, particularly Maoris, who just could not give up.

He said it was without carcinogens, its use had been shown substantially to reduce the incidence of lung cancer and it meant smoke-free environments for family members.

Cunningham said that with only about 10,000 smokers a year giving up, the smoke-free New Zealand goal would not be achieved with current strategies. He proposed “structural levers” such as decreasing quotas on production to keep reducing the tobacco supply.

Although young New Zealanders cannot legally buy cigarettes until the age of 18, Ministry of Health surveys show that nearly 27 percent of 15 to 19-year-olds smoke, more than the national rate of 23.5 percent.

Sharon Ponniah, an Otago University PhD student, told the conference that almost half the smokers in this age group wanted to quit but few sought help and more and better quit services were needed.

“We know the abstinence rate for smokers who try to quit unaided is very low — only around 3 percent who go ‘cold turkey’ are successful,” she said.

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