The World Health Organization (WHO) will meet behind closed doors in Moscow later this month to discuss adopting new measures to regulate and curb the use of tobacco products, including e-cigarettes.
The WHO will meet in Moscow on Oct. 13 for a weeklong meeting of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, a legally binding treaty ratified by 179 countries that aims to reduce global tobacco use . The provisional agenda for the meeting includes discussion of "price and tax measures to reduce the demand for tobacco."
The U.S. is not one of the 179 countries to ratify the framework, but in the past it has attended the conventions. However, this year the U.S. declined to send a delegation due to ongoing diplomatic and trade sanctions against Russia.
"Given Russia’s ongoing violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, the U.S. government is suspending some activities with Russia and will not participate this year at the FCTC being held in Moscow later this month," Bill Hall, director of the news division at the Department of Health and Human Services, told the Hill.
In 2012, WHO considered a global excise tax of up to 70 percent on cigarettes in participating countries.
"Effective taxes on tobacco products that lead to higher real consumer prices (inflation-adjusted) are desirable because they lower consumption and prevalence, and thereby in turn reduce mortality and morbidity and improve the health of the population," according to a set of guiding principles passed by the framework in 2012.
However, free market tax policy analysts and the tobacco industry argue the taxes would only lead to more black market cigarette sales.
"Increasing tax levels can be counterproductive," Dr. Art Laffer, an American economist who served in the Reagan administration, said. "Once tax levels are in the prohibitive range of the Laffer Curve, tax revenues will fall, and if consumers shift to lower taxed or black market tobacco products, it may not even lead to less smoking."
The tobacco industry worries that new taxes, even if they do not apply to the United States, would reduce tobacco exports and seriously impact its bottom line. The United States is one of the largest producers of tobacco in the world.
The framework will also potentially pass new international standards on the electronic cigarette industry. In August, WHO released a report in August calling for regulations to block marketing of e-cigarettes to children, as well as the indoor use of e-cigarettes.
E-cigarettes "pose a serious health threat to adolescents and fetuses," the report said, "and increase exposure of nonsmokers and bystanders to nicotine and a number of toxicants."
However, some public health officials and addiction experts have criticized the report. In an open letter, 53 researches urged WHO not to regulate e-cigarettes as normal tobacco products.
"These products could be among the most significant health innovations of the 21st Century—perhaps saving hundreds of millions of lives," the letter states. "If regulators treat low-risk nicotine products as traditional tobacco products ... they are improperly defining them as part of the problem.