Experts talked about ways to achieve their goals in the fight against smoking.

The actual implementation of existing anti-smoking regulations in national legislation will be a more effective mechanism for solving this problem than a further increase in the number of these regulations. This was stated by the experts interviewed by Izvestia, commenting statement by Mikhail Murashko, Minister of Health of the Russian Federation, on plans to reduce the prevalence of smoking in Russia to 16% by 2030 as part of the federal Health for Everyone project.

"Historically, the achievement of targets in the Ministry of Health's fight against the spread of smoking has been largely due to the introduction of the provisions of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) into Russian regulation, which recently turned 20 years old. The parties to this convention are 183 states, whose population covers 90% of our planet," says Igor Stroganov, Associate Professor at the Department of Strategic and International Management at the Higher School of Business of the National Research University Higher School of Economics.

According to Stroganov, today Russian legislation fully complies with the requirements of the WHO Framework Convention. "Taking into account the relevant Federal law adopted in Russia in 2013 and updated several times since then, "On protecting citizens' health from exposure to ambient tobacco smoke, the effects of tobacco use or consumption of nicotine-containing products," the mandatory norms and provisions of the WHO FCTC have already been sufficiently reflected in national regulation. In addition, over the past few years alone, more than 20 related prohibitive initiatives have entered into force," the expert believes.

According to Igor Stroganov, the way to actually reduce the number of smokers may be to ensure the systematic and conscientious implementation of legal norms in the field of tobacco control that have already entered into force, rather than creating new prohibitive initiatives.

According to experts, further tightening of the policy in the field of production and sale of tobacco and nicotine-containing products will not only not solve existing problems, but will also add new ones, such as "gray" imports and illegal distribution of counterfeit products dangerous to health.

According to Mikhail Perelman, Candidate of Economic Sciences, Associate Professor of the RANEPA Department of Management under the President of the Russian Federation, additional bans will be counterproductive to achieve the goals set by the Ministry of Health. "The WHO FCTC toolkit assumes two forms of measures to combat the spread of tobacco smoking — price and non-price. The first are direct and indirect taxes, such as the tobacco excise tax. The second is restrictions on advertising, open display, and similar measures. Given the variety of such standards that have already been incorporated into Russian legislation from the WHO FCTC, the introduction of additional restrictions, especially harsh ones, including a complete ban on certain types of products or a complete ban on the consumption of tobacco and nicotine—containing products from a certain age, looks excessive and counterproductive," said Perelman.

Mikhail Perelman stressed the importance of ensuring the effective implementation of existing norms and legal instruments in our legislation instead of implementing prohibitive approaches, which, as the experience of a number of developing countries, including South Africa and Panama, shows, lead to a significant increase in the illegal market, effectively making anti-smoking measures as such meaningless.