As smokers grow six-fold in 40 years in IndonesiaGriya Balur would be shut down in many parts of the world, but not in Indonesia, one of the developing-country new frontiers for big tobacco as it seeks to replace its dwindling profits in the health-conscious West.
Long traditions of tobacco use combined with poor regulation and the billions of dollars that flow into government coffers from the tobacco industry mean places like Griya Balur go unchallenged.
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Seriously folks, Indonesia where:
Economic Costs Attributable to Tobacco*
Indonesia: $842,000,000
Percent of Youth in Homes with Smokers
Indonesia: 66.8
Percent of Males Who Smoke Cigarettes
Indonesia: 62.1
Size of Health Warnings on Cigarettes
Indonesia: 0
A $Trillion Dollar Hole with Burden Shift on World's Poorest Countries...
The global economy lost a staggering amount due to tobacco use. These economic costs come as a result of lost productivity, misused resources, missed opportunities for taxation, and premature death.
- Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death, taking 5 million life's each year.
- Smoking-related fires are also the leading cause of fire related deaths,
- One survey found that 60% of Chinese adults did not know that smoking can cause lung cancer while 96% were unaware it can cause heart disease.
- At least a quarter of all deaths from heart diseases and about three-quarters of world's chronic bronchitis are related to smoking.
- Smoking-related diseases cost the United States more than $150 billion a year.
- 46 million Americans (20.6 percent) are current cigarette smokers are costing the nation $96 billion in health care costs annually.
- Because 25 percent of smokers die and many more become ill during their most productive years, income loss devastates families and communities.
- Cigarettes are the world's most widely smuggled legal consumer product. In 2006, about 600 billion smuggled cigarettes made it to the market, representing an enormous missed tax opportunity for governments, as well as a missed opportunity to prevent many people from starting to smoke and encourage others to quit.
- Tobacco replaces potential food production on almost 4 million hectares of the world's agricultural land, equal to all of the world's orange groves or banana plantations.
- In developing countries, smokers spend disproportionate sums of money relative to their incomes that could otherwise be spent on food, healthcare, and other necessities.