Recognizing his efforts aimed at reducing the number of Turks smoking, the World Health Organization awarded Turkey’s prime minister with a special prize Monday in Ankara, Anatolia news agency reported.
“About 100,000 people in our country and more than 5 million people worldwide die annually because of diseases caused by smoking,” Recep Tayyip Edoğan said during the awards ceremony, which coincided with the first anniversary of the country’s indoor smoking ban.
The WHO gave the prime minister its 2010 Special Prize for the Global Fight against Smoking.
“Active smokers are as risky as people who hang around with a weapon in their hands,” he said, adding that the number of people who lose their lives because of smoking is much larger than that of terrorism victims and that more than 50 diseases in the world today are caused by smoking.
Erdoğan said the government was determined to continue the struggle against smoking and called for people to contribute to the mission.
The prime minister also said people present in the surroundings of smokers were negatively affected by smoking, mentioning the WHO’s estimates that 700 million children are exposed to cigarette smoke.
“One can notice smoking is widespread even in families that are extremely poor and live in very difficult conditions,” Erdoğan said during his speech.
“I see poor people who cannot even provide proper food and clothes for themselves, carrying packets of cigarettes in their pockets,” he said, adding that smoking was not an excuse for people’s suffering, but rather constituted a new socio-economic problem in itself.
The prime minister said Turkey had become very sensitive to the struggle against smoking, despite the expression “smoking like a Turk,” which is widely used in Europe to refer to heavy smokers, and that it had already become a country with good progress in smoking statistics.
Referring to people who think that the anti-smoking law limited smokers’ freedom, Erdoğan said, “There is no freedom for suicide.”
According to research conducted in Turkey in November 2008 before the smoking ban, 31.2 percent of adults, or 16 million people, were active smokers.
A report prepared by the medicine faculty of Marmara University and published this month by the National Committee for Smoking and Health said 363 million fewer packs of cigarettes were consumed in Turkey in 2010 compared to the first half of 2009, representing a saving of 1.8 billion Turkish Liras.
Moreover, the income from the special and value-added tax on cigarettes showed an increase for the same period compared to a year before.
The same report also said that during the same period of 2010, the applications to hospitals for heart diseases were reduced by 33.6 percent, while those with asthma fell 20.5 percent.
