Noord-Nederland op weg naar een rookvrije generatie?

Over the past century the prevalence of smoking dropped by more than half in the Netherlands. Yet still about a quarter of our population smokes, and smoking tobacco is still the single most important cause of illness and premature death. In our country daily too many children start smoking and too few smokers succeed
each year to stop smoking permanently. Many people now realize that smoking is not healthy and most parents would prefer their children not to smoke. The health risks are however still often underestimated as well as how addictive smoking is, how relatively simple children can become addicted to tobacco and how difficult it is to quit. Moreover many seem to understand insufficiently how solid this addiction is
rooted in our society. Smoking is not just a major social and individual problem,
but it is above all a problem of social network structures inside often a strong transgenerational transmission of this addiction. In this article we discuss a vision for
a sustainable approach to the tobacco problem, which not only population-based measures should be taken, but additionally mainly a regional and local approach desired. By de-normalizing smoking and by changing knowledge and attitudes among individuals and within social networks, with better support for smokers to quit smoking in a possible smoke free environment, will eventually have fewer children start smoking and more going to stop smoking. In the long term this could lead to a more vital region, where not only the current residents, but also the next generations will benefit from.