Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-12-11-Speech-1-052"
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"en.20001211.3.1-052"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, 80 fatalities in Europe from new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and Europe, its Council of Ministers, the Commission and Parliament decide to ban meat-and-bone meal and exclude cattle over 30 months’ old from the food chain without prior testing. Better late than never.
Fifty thousand deaths a year for decades, due to the consequences of using a drug with known side-effects for which doctors and hospital departments know there is only palliative treatment, and nothing is done apart from a few timid information campaigns. Then, when a directive does come along seeking to regulate the distribution of that drug and information about it – I am talking about tobacco – there is an outcry from some Members. But ladies and gentlemen, if you truly acknowledged the health problems linked to tobacco, you would demand a ban on this drug, just as you continue to maintain the bans on other substances despite the fact that, quantitatively, they are far less lethal. You are responsible for the health of millions of citizens, and also for the deaths of thousands of young people who have not been given sufficient information.
Cases have recently been won in the United States against the tobacco multinationals for poisoning people and lying about the toxicity of their products. Now, in France, the Loire-Atlantique health insurance company has won the right to sue the tobacco industry in the courts. But in the future, just as with contaminated blood and mad cow disease, legal action will be taken against those who knew about it and let it happen, and that means you, us, the decision makers, the legislators.
So let us do something together, just a small thing in view of how much remains to be done. Let us reduce the levels of nicotine and tar; ban addictive substances, like ammonia which is added to the nicotine to increase addiction to cigarettes; attach legible warnings covering at least 35% of the cigarette packet to alert people to the risks and dangers of tobacco; get rid of lies like ‘light’ and ‘ultra-light’ which encourage young people, especially young women, to smoke in the belief that this makes it less harmful, when medical science now agrees that the upsurge in peripheral small-cell lung cancers which are more insidious, more difficult to diagnose and have even more tragic prognoses is linked to over-consumption of this type of cigarette; evaluate the socio-economic cost of tobacco and transform the subsidies to tobacco producers into real redevelopment subsidies benefiting, for example, the production of cereals to replace meat-and-bone meal; recognise that products intended for export should comply with the same regulations as those intended for the internal European market; raise the price of tobacco because that is a measure which has a direct incidence on consumption, especially by young people; and harmonise tax rates.
None of this amounts to a great deal, ladies and gentlemen, and it will not really damage the interests of the tobacco industry, which some people would apparently rather protect than public health. Much more needs to be done. In fact, this directive should be extended to products other than cigarettes, like cigars and rolling tobacco, which are no less harmful. The ban on advertising these lethal products should be confirmed, and the collective rules on no-smoking areas should be extended. We have a lot of work to do.
I urge you to adopt Mr Maaten’s report as a first step in the interests of the health of future generations."@en1
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