A crippling habit  

By Justin Martin

I recently had a conversation with a taxicab driver about cigarette smoking. As a curious American surprised by the level of Jordanians' rampant and seemingly unbridled use of cigarettes, I asked my driver why he chose to smoke, as we raced down Zahran Street in thin mid-morning traffic.

The cabbie explained that, due mostly to monotony and boredom, he smokes between two and three packs of cigarettes six days a week, every day he drives his cab. When spending Fridays with his family and friends, he smokes one pack. He confessed he'd been smoking this way for the past 18 years.

First and second-hand health detriments aside, smoking of this stripe in Jordan enervates and stifles economic growth.

Consider: this particular taxi driver probably earns less than JD350 monthly, and the cost of the 70 or so packs of cigarettes he purchases each month represents a sizeable chunk of his annual salary. On the day I rode with him he smoked Winstons, American-made cigarettes that do not come cheaply. At roughly JD1 per box, the cost of 70 packs reduces this man's monthly income from JD350 to 280, a salary drop of 20 per cent.

In a country like Jordan, where GDP per capita income is a struggling JD3,200, cigarette smoking can be a major drain on Jordanians' discretionary income. With more than 10 per cent of Jordanians living below the World Bank's definition of abject poverty, the Kingdom cannot afford to allow smoking levels to increase or to even continue at the same rates.

Measures have been taken in the past to curtail tobacco use in Jordan, albeit futilely. In the late 1970s, Jordan became the first country in the Middle East to ban smoking in public places, including public transportation vehicles. Police officers on the street were apparently never notified of such prohibitions, however, because public smoking in the Kingdom, especially in buses and taxicabs, poses few if any threats of reprimand.

Despite these measures, Jordanians continue smoking, burning hundreds of millions of dinars every year. Jordan's Department of Statistics reported within the last five years that Jordanians spend about JD250 million (approximately $350 million) on tobacco products every year, a sum representing two per cent of Jordan's gross national product in 2004. This bears repeating: one of every 50 dinars generated by the Jordanian economy is spent on tobacco.

The Ministry of Health has attempted to combat Jordanians' use of tobacco in recent years, but numbers from the World Health Organisation do not prove promising. In 2002, the WHO reported that smoking in Jordan is very common among the youngest of teenagers. According to the report, one in five Jordanian teens between the ages of 13 and 15 regularly smoke cigarettes. The WHO also noted that these figures are made all the more alarming by the fact that 50 per cent of Jordanian citizens are younger than 18.

Smokers hooked on tobacco at a young age are far more likely to develop long-term addictions difficult or impossible to shake. In this way, smoking can become for many Jordanians a lifelong contributor to poverty and financial instability.

Adding to the fiscal problems of smoking is the fact that Jordanians tend to buy cigarettes from tobacco manufacturers outside the Kingdom, with money which could be spent on goods and services inside the Kingdom. British and American tobacco corporations do quite well in underdeveloped countries like Jordan, but only heavily add to financial woes in these locales.

Another major economic concern stemming from heavy smoking is worker productivity. Due to the intermittent smoking breaks in schools and some offices where smoking is forbidden, as well as sick days that number more for smokers than non-smokers, productivity — a worker's average output in the average hour — suffers dramatically.

It is in no way a secret that the Jordanian economy has performed phenomenally in the last five to ten years. Certainly, continued and possibly greater progress is possible, but the new government needs to take more steps to reduce tobacco consumption in the Kingdom. Whether through increased taxes on tobacco or stronger bans on tobacco advertising in Jordan, government officials must do whatever possible to curb tobacco use that continues to sap the country's economic momentum.

The writer is an American Fulbright scholar in Jordan and a PhD student in journalism at the University of North Carolina. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.