Dubai: Dubai’s annual anti-tobacco drive during which retail shops and petrol stations stop selling cigarettes for 24 hours to mark the World No Tobacco Day has gone up in smoke this year.
The suspension of sale of tobacco products was a major component of Dubai Municipality’s ‘A Day Without Tobacco’ campaign held for the last six years.
This year, the municipality has been forced to discontinue the annual drive of stopping cigarette sales for 24 hours on World No Tobacco Day on May 31.
The Public Health and Safety Department at the civic body has not asked retail shops and petrol stations to stop the sale of tobacco products, a senior official confirmed to Gulf News on Sunday.
Marwan Abdullah Al Mohammad, director of the Department, said the department scrapped the campaign since it did not serve its purpose as smokers outwitted the officials and stocked up on cigarettes the previous day.
“Smokers are clever,” said Al Mohammad. “Now they know that we will stop the sale of cigarettes on this day. So they buy extra packets a day before and keep them. So we found it useless to do a big campaign. Instead, we have told shops that they can volunteer to stop the sale if they are willing to,” he noted.
The department had launched the anti-tobacco initiative in 2010 with just 50 petrol stations stopping the sale of cigarettes for 24 hours on May 31. Over the years, the number of participating outlets grew with more categories of retail shops joining the drive. A whopping 500 shops across Dubai stopped sale of cigarettes in 2014. Last year, all shops in Dubai were asked to abstain from the sale of tobacco products for a day.
This time, Al Mohammad said, the department is using innovative games and graphics to encourage smokers to kick the habit. Posters with images of cigarette sticks and pipes getting hanged to death are being used as part of the awareness drive in malls and municipality centres. “Today is the day for you to get on track ….to beat smoking” reads the slogan on the posters.
Smokers will also be invited to play a snakes and ladder game where the snakes are replaced with cigarettes and shisha, and ladders are replaced with fruits and milk. To win prizes, smokers will have to discard the cigarettes in their possession every time the dice lands on cigarette/shisha images.
