Germany wants to declare war on smokers in the future, according to a press release issued at the town hall meeting in Berlin on 10 March 2020, because, compared with other European countries, measures to reduce tobacco consumption are either not effective or are not even being implemented. This is also shown by the „European Tobacco Control Scale 2019“ presented in Berlin, on which Germany, unfortunately, occupies the last place. The whole thing was presented at the „European Conference on Tobacco or Health (ECToH)“. According to this, Germany is striving for a ban on tobacco advertising so that 17 million Germans who currently smoke will stop smoking altogether or switch to less harmful substitute products such as e-cigarettes and tobacco heaters as an alternative. However, the risk of vascular and tumour diseases with far-reaching consequences has not yet reached the minds of the German population, as the number of smokers has been stagnating since 2016. In addition, only 15 percent of those affected attempt to stop smoking. This calls for an all-German strategy that is evidence-based and rational because individual measures such as tax increases and shock images of smokers only help to a limited extent. Therefore, health experts in the field of so-called lifestyle diseases call for a rethink with an integrated tobacco control strategy, which must also start with detailed information campaigns among young people, so that they do not start smoking in the first place and later produce high costs in the German health system. Invited to the event were physicians, patient representatives, representatives of the cost bearers and health policymakers, such as Erwin Rüddel as patron of the event and member of the Bundestag as well as chairman of the Federal Health Committee. A representative of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) Heidelberg, Dr. Ute Mons, was also present and reported on the real effects of more harmless variants of smoking.
