France will ban smoking on beaches, near public buildings like schools and in public parks and forests next year, the French government said on Tuesday, as it unveiled plans to curb the habit by making it slightly more expensive and far less attractive, especially to younger people.
“We have won battles,” Aurélien Rousseau, France’s health minister, said at a news conference in Paris.
Noting that the smoking rate for 17-year-olds had already dropped to 16 percent in 2022 — down from 25 percent in 2017 — he added that “tobacco remains a major public health scourge.”The government’s plan is part of an ambitious effort to produce the first “no-tobacco generation” by 2032.
While anti-smoking campaigners welcomed some of the measures announced by Mr. Rousseau, they said that lofty objective would be hard to achieve if the government did not act even more forcefully to push up the price of cigarettes.
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