Plus 50 cents in 2023, plus 35 cents in 2024… After two years of stability, the price of cigarettes will now follow inflation, the government has decided, pleading the fight against smoking, to the chagrin of tobacco companies who predict a jump in illegal sales.

Today of 10.15 euros, the price of the package would therefore reach 11 euros in two years

"It would be quite paradoxical for the increase in cigarettes to be lower than inflation", this would mean that "finally, relatively, the price would drop", declared Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne on Monday morning on RMC / BFMTV, on the occasion the presentation of the draft budget for 2023.

Do not restart the increase in tobacco consumption?

The government is also announcing “new adapted tax scales” for products that are less taxed today, such as rolling tobacco and heating tobacco.

To justify this increase, the government argues that the tax increase from 2018 to 2020, which brought the pack of 20 cigarettes to 10 euros, paid off in terms of public health, by leading to an “unprecedented drop in the consumption of these products: -22% in volume between 2017 and 2021” and around “two million French people who have stopped smoking since 2017, according to Public Health France”, says Bercy.

However, after a tax freeze in 2021 and 2022, high inflation, if it were not passed on to tobacco prices, could lead to a "fall in real tobacco prices", and to increase consumption, according to the Ministry.

"If we let young people start smoking with a cheap pack, we produce the smokers of the next 30 years: but the real scandal is that at 14 or 15, they are already buying cigarettes without any control, at tobacconists,” says Loïc Josseran, professor of public health and president of the Alliance Against Tobacco.

Tobacco companies fear rising traffic

“This important tax measure makes it possible to reflect on one's consumption and to gain purchasing power, knowing that quitting smoking is completely covered by health insurance.

A Smicard who quits smoking gets a third of his salary back,” he points out.

Unsurprisingly, cigarette manufacturers protested against a "considerable tax increase" according to Jeanne Pollès, president of Philip Morris France, which produces the best-selling brand in the world, Marlboro.

This will penalize "the poorest French people" and "aggravate the rise in trafficking in cheap fake cigarettes", she told AFP.

Same story at British American Tobacco (BAT), which evokes a "gift to organized crime", according to a spokesperson, predicting the appearance of "new counterfeit tobacco factories in France" - two have been dismantled at this day.

73,000 deaths in France each year

The leading cause of preventable death, tobacco kills some 73,000 people in France, with a direct cost of 20 to 26 billion euros per year for health insurance and an overall "social cost" (deaths, illnesses, production losses, but also spending on prevention, repression and care, for the State) estimated at 120 billion by the French Observatory of Drugs and Drug Addiction.

Taxation on tobacco, it brings 13 to 14 billion euros per year to the State, according to Bercy.

A year ago, a parliamentary report estimated the shortfall in tax revenue at 3 billion euros, linked to illegal tobacco consumed in France - estimated between 14% and 17% of consumption.

Friday the tobacconists demanded "a multi-annual visibility of taxation", declared to AFP Philippe Coy, president of the Confederation of tobacconists, which represents the 24,500 tobacconists having the monopoly of the sale of tobacco.

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  • Passive smoking

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