News release

From:

This preliminary high-level modelling suggests a mandated-denicotinisation policy could have a plausible
chance of achieving the New Zealand government’s Smokefree 2025 goal. But the probability of success
would increase if supplemented with interventions such as mass media campaigns offering Quitline support
(especially if predominantly designed for a Māori audience).

Key Points
**This study modelled the potential impact of denicotinisation of tobacco (with no other tobacco permitted
for sale) out to the year 2025 in Aotearoa New Zealand.

**The modelled results with the denicotinisation intervention suggested that adult daily smoking
prevalences were all estimated to decline to under 5% in 2025 for the European/Other ethnic grouping and
in one scenario for Māori. Nevertheless, prevalence did not fall below 5% in the base case for Māori (down
to 7.7%) or with Scenario 2 (5.2%).

**In the base case used in the modelling, vaping was estimated to increase to 7.9% in the adult population in
2025, and up to 10.7% in one scenario.

**We concluded that this preliminary high-level modelling suggests a mandated denicotinisation policy
could have a plausible chance of achieving the New Zealand government’s Smokefree 2025 goal. But the
probability of success would increase if supplemented with interventions such as mass media campaigns
offering Quitline support (especially if predominantly designed for a Māori audience).