The NZ government has said that it would ban all sales of cigarettes for it’s future generations, as part of the country’s push to go smoke free by 2025.

Announced yesterday, the prohibition means anyone who is 14 years old and under will never be able to legally buy tobacco in the country.

Currently, smoking is still the leading cause of preventable death in Aotearoa. It causes 1 in 4 cancers and results in 4,000 to 5,000 smoking related premature deaths every year.

Associate minister of health Ayesha Verrall has said that support measures will also be introduced to assist smokers trying to cut the habit.

The government also has plans to reduce legal nicotine levels in smoked tobacco to very low amounts and to slash the number of stores selling these products. This and other measures such as increasing the cost of cigarettes and regularly increasing the age limit to purchase is all part of the plan to be smoke free by 2025.

Not included in this legislation is a ban on vaping, which studies have shown in about 2 or 3 times more prevalent than smoking in New Zealand. Smoking has already been widely replaced by vaping among teenage New Zealanders, and is also attracting many young people who would never have taken up smoking – according to surveying of 19,000 high school students this year, nearly 20% were vaping daily or several times a day, the majority with high nicotine doses.

That’s compared to 3% of those aged 15-17 who smoked daily in 2018, or 13% who smoked a decade earlier.

It’s a big plan for Aotearoa. What are your thoughts?