I’ve been coming to Greece regularly since 2003. This time I sensed quite quickly that
something had changed. But I couldn't
put my finger on it. Not until lunchtime
on my second day did I realise what it was.
As I sat eating a plate of mixed fried fish, squid and octopus by the
little harbour in Palaia Epidavros in the Peloponnese I noticed a middle-aged
woman at the next table smoking a cigarette.
And I then realised what was different – she was the first person I had
seen smoking in 24 hours.
And it wasn’t until the next day that I saw two people
smoking together – and they turned out to be American college students.
Since then I have seen a number of smokers – but many fewer
than I have been accustomed to seeing.
Has Greece suddenly changed?
In the early 2000s Eurbarometer survey data showed that
Greece had the unenviable position as the smoking capital of the European
Union – and beaten only by Serbia in an all-European league-table. I remember
one particular statistic – that 34 % of adult women smoked. Actually, at one time it seemed to be almost
compulsory for middle-aged middle-class women to smoke. That certainly appeared to be the case in one
of the bigger cities that I visited regularly. As recently as 2011 the World
Health Organisation reported that Greek women were the heaviest smokers in the
world.
In 2010 the government introduced a smoking ban in
restaurants and bars – and then quietly but quickly announced that it would not
be enforced in the face of pressure from bar owners and restaurateurs who swore
that the ban would drastically reduce their clientele at a time when business
was already suffering. I have sat under
the ‘no smoking’ signs in good restaurants while almost everyone around me has
been piling up the butts in an ash tray.
So what has happened?
I have been touring the southern Peloponnese for some days and the
impression has certainly strengthened that smoking rates are down. But is this a factor of geography – with
lower smoking rates in rural areas than in, say, Athens? Or is it a function of the heat, with
temperatures over the last few days being in the mid to high 30s? (I
remember a friend telling me once about touring the same area by car in
temperatures of over 40 degrees and being held up by an advancing forest fire at
which point other drivers lit up cigarettes – and threw the matches away into
the already tinder-dry bush.) Perhaps
it’s a function of Greece’s period of austerity, with people unable to afford
cigarettes – although observation elsewhere suggests that smoking is one of the
last things to be given up. Or, perhaps,
just perhaps, all the public health campaigning is working.
A bit of research suggests that my first impressions were
actually correct. Greece’s smoking rates
ARE dropping rapidly and significantly. Indeed I am amazed how fast. In 2008 Greek adults smoked an average of
3055 cigarettes per year. By 2014,
according to World Health Organisation data, that had dropped to 2086 – a
reduction of almost exactly one third in only 6 years. And Greece has now fallen down the league
table of European smokers, now headed by Montenegro, with Belarus, Macedonia
(sorry to any Greek readers – regard that as being the Former Yugoslav Republic
of Macedonia), Russia, Slovenia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
and the Czech Republic following. But
Greece still has a long way to go to get down to Iceland and Norway’s cigarette
consumption, at 551 and 556 cigarettes per adult per year respectively. The 2014 data put the UK as having the third lowest European consumption, at 827.
With the reduction in smoking, Greece is an even nicer place
to be than it was before. The air is clearer in bars and restaurants - and hotel rooms don't reek of the tobacco habits of previous guests. But I haven’t
found any recent data on gendered changes in consumption. That first smoker I had noticed in Palaia
Epidavros was a woman. And at breakfast yesterday
on the terrace of my hotel in Nea Oitylo in the Mani three out of the four at
the next table each smoked one cigarette, but it was a woman in her 30s who
smoked five.
