Democracy and health: tobacco control in Poland.

Abstract

At the end of the 1980s, Poland had the highest cigarette consumption in the world. Polish men, in particular, had been heavy smokers for years. Their addiction had made cancers common and lives short (figure 5.1). By 1990, the odds that a 15-year-old Polish boy would live to the age of 60 were lower than for his peers in most other countries in the world, including India and China (Murray and Lopez 1994). The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that almost half of the premature deaths among Polish men were caused by inhaling tobacco smoke (Peto and others 1992). Over half of the burden of noncommunicable disease among Polish men was smoking related. The medical community in Poland began to raise the alarm in the 1980s, when it became clear that the incidence of lung cancer in Poland was higher than almost anywhere else in Europe except Hungary (Zatonski and others 1996). The health, economic, and social costs of smoking spurred Polish doctors and health advocates to look for ways of reversing the advancing health catastrophe.