Report from the witness seminar on tobacco control policy in Poland, Chief Sanitary Inspectorate, Warsaw, Poland, 31 May 2016

The witness seminar, organised by the Health Promotion Foundation (Fundacja “Promocja Zdrowia”) and hosted by the Chief Sanitary Inspectorate, brought together leading politicians, public health activists, and senior bureaucrats, some of whom have been historically involved in Poland’s anti-tobacco advocacy and policy­making, and others who continue their involvement. The format of the meeting was modelled after the witness seminar programme organised by the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. It has been characterised as “a particularly specialised form of oral history, where several people associated with a particular set of circumstances or events are invited to come together to discuss, debate, and agree or disagree about their memories” [1]. The seminar provided an opportunity for an in-depth, moderated discussion on the past, present, and future of tobacco control in Poland, with a particular focus on the introduction and impact of the Polish Anti-Tobacco Law of 1995 and its amendment of 1999 [2].

Background and introduction

The discussion opened with an outline of the history of anti-tobacco advocacy in Poland, a version of which has been published in the previous issue of the Journal of Health Inequalities [3]. Jan Bondar then opened the first section of the seminar, launching a discussion on the origins of Polish anti-tobacco legislation. When did the question of tobacco control policy first appear on the radar of Polish policymakers? Why were no legislative solutions introduced in the 1980s, despite several attempts of the anti-tobacco advocates? Why were the major advances made in the 1990s, in the period of post-communist transformation?

Smoking epidemiology in Poland

Witold Zatoński laid out the epidemiological picture that fueled the rising concern over smoking in Poland in the 1980s. After the Second World War, Poland experienced a rapid increase in the sale of cigarettes, which peaked in the 1980s. At the time, Poles were among the top smokers in the world with a smoking prevalence of about 80% in men and 50% in women. In the 1990s, the sale of cigarettes began to decrease. Between 1990 and 2015, it fell from 100 billion to 40 billion. These changes were followed by improving health indicators – lung cancer rates, which in the early 1990s in Poland were at one of the highest levels in the world, halved between 1990 and 2015 (Fig. 2). The most important effect of these...


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