{"id":63284,"date":"2026-05-29T12:22:03","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T12:22:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyspokesman.net\/live\/?p=63284"},"modified":"2026-05-29T12:23:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T12:23:21","slug":"fuel-goes-up-overnight-tobacco-stays-cheap-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailyspokesman.net\/live\/2026\/05\/29\/fuel-goes-up-overnight-tobacco-stays-cheap-why\/","title":{"rendered":"Fuel Goes Up Overnight. Tobacco Stays Cheap. Why?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tehreem Akhtar Qureshi<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Your petrol bill went up again. You felt it at the pump, in the rickshaw fare, in the price of a loaf of bread that crossed town on a diesel truck. Maybe you told your family to cut back this month. Maybe you just did the math in your head and said nothing. Either way, you noticed.<\/p>\n

That same week, somewhere near a school in your city, a teenager bought a cigarette, or a mango-flavoured vape, for less than the price of a snack. No minister called a press conference. No inflation chart went viral. No one said a word.<\/p>\n

That silence is not an accident. It is a policy choice. And it is costing us more than we are willing to admit.<\/p>\n

When fuel prices rise, the machinery of government moves fast. Economists appear on television. Opposition parties find their voices. Subsidies get debated. Committees are formed. We treat petrol prices as a measure of national health, and in fairness, they are. Fuel powers transport, agriculture, and industry. Its cost ripples through everything.<\/p>\n

But I keep coming back to a question nobody seems to answer: if we are this sensitive to the cost of things that harm our economy, why are we so quiet about the cost of things that are killing our people?<\/p>\n

Tobacco kills approximately 8 million people every year, according to the World Health Organization. That number does not shrink. It does not fluctuate with election cycles or commodity prices. It just keeps coming, year after year, larger than most wars, most famines, most pandemics running in any given year. And yet, across country after country, a pack of cigarettes remains easier to afford than a decent meal.<\/p>\n

“We treat fuel as too economically important to leave unmanaged. We treat tobacco as too politically inconvenient to manage at all.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Governments tax fuel because it works. Higher prices reduce consumption, generate revenue, and push people toward alternatives. This is not controversial economic logic. We apply it to petrol, diesel, and gas without blinking.<\/p>\n

The same logic applies to tobacco. The evidence is not new, and it is not contested. The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, a global health treaty ratified by over 180 countries, spells it out clearly in Article 6: tobacco taxes are among the most effective tools for reducing consumption, particularly among young people and lower-income populations. When cigarettes become more expensive, fewer people start smoking. Fewer people starting means fewer deaths. The arithmetic is not complicated.<\/p>\n

And yet, tobacco tax policy lags decades behind fuel tax policy. Tobacco companies are among the most profitable corporations on earth because they have spent decades successfully lobbying to keep their products cheap, addictive, and everywhere. The result is a system where the cost of driving is adjusted in real time to reflect market realities, while the cost of smoking is quietly kept low enough to keep the next generation hooked.<\/p>\n

Here is something that rarely appears in our domestic policy conversation: Pakistan is not a bystander to this global debate. Pakistan ratified the WHO FCTC in 2004, making it one of the early signatories among developing nations, and one of 182 countries that have now joined what remains the first international public health treaty negotiated under the WHO.<\/p>\n

That ratification was not symbolic. It was a binding commitment. And the treaty is specific about what that commitment includes.<\/p>\n

Pakistan has not met that 75% threshold. As of 2024 to 2025, Federal Excise Duty on cigarettes still falls significantly below the WHO-recommended benchmark. The tobacco industry’s favourite counter-argument, that higher taxes fuel illicit trade, has already been addressed within the very treaty Pakistan signed. The Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products gives governments the tools to tackle smuggling without using it as cover for keeping taxes artificially low.<\/p>\n

We signed the treaty. We made the commitment. We just have not followed through, while somehow finding the political energy every few months to manage fuel price adjustments down to the last paisa.<\/p>\n

Walk past any convenience store near any school and you will see exactly what that policy gap looks like in practice. Cigarettes, and increasingly flavoured vapes in mango, mint, and bubblegum, priced just right for a fifteen-year-old’s pocket money. This is not a coincidence of commerce.<\/p>\n

Young people who begin using tobacco before the age of 18 are far more likely to become long-term, dependent users. The industry knows this. Policymakers know this. The tools that could break this pipeline, sustained, inflation-adjusted tobacco taxes, remain politically untouched.<\/p>\n

A fifteen-year-old in a low-income neighbourhood can afford a cigarette before school, but cannot afford the healthcare that will eventually treat what it does to his lungs.<\/p>\n

Treating tobacco-related illness costs national health systems billions each year, in direct medical expenditure, lost productivity, and the premature deaths of working-age adults. These are not speculative projections. They are documented burdens in health budgets across the developing and developed world.<\/p>\n

Higher tobacco taxes do not just save lives. They generate revenue that can be directed toward healthcare, education, and cessation programmes. Several countries have implemented exactly this. The outcomes are consistent: consumption falls, revenue rises, and the pressure on public health systems begins to ease.<\/p>\n

The next time a government announces a fuel price adjustment, ask them this: when did you last raise the tobacco tax? Not a token increase. Not a figure that quietly disappears into inflation within a year. A real, significant, sustained increase, one that makes a cigarette genuinely harder for a first-time teenage buyer to afford.<\/p>\n

If the answer is vague, or evasive, or years ago, you have your answer about whose interests are actually being protected.<\/p>\n

I do not know when the next fuel price hike will come. But I know that tomorrow morning, another teenager will buy a cigarette outside a school, and no minister will say a word. Fuel prices go up because someone decided they should. Tobacco stays cheap because someone decided it should. Both are choices. One is just more honest about it.<\/p>\n

\n
The world loses 8 million people a year to tobacco. Pakistan signed a treaty promising to act. We count every rupee at the pump. It is time we started counting what we are choosing not to price.<\/strong><\/h5>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Daily The Spokesman’ point of view<\/em><\/p>\n

The writer is BBA Student and\u00a0 Youth Advocate for Tobacco Control<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tehreem Akhtar Qureshi Your petrol bill went up again. You felt it at the pump, in the rickshaw fare, in the price of a loaf of bread that crossed town on a diesel truck. Maybe you told your family to cut back this month. Maybe you just did the math in your head and said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63285,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[943,942,944],"class_list":["post-63284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-editorial-articles","tag-fuel-goes-up-overnight","tag-tehreem-akhtar-qureshi","tag-tobacco-stays-cheap-why"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyspokesman.net\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyspokesman.net\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyspokesman.net\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyspokesman.net\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyspokesman.net\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyspokesman.net\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63286,"href":"https:\/\/dailyspokesman.net\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63284\/revisions\/63286"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyspokesman.net\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyspokesman.net\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyspokesman.net\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyspokesman.net\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}