Smoking in public places will be prohibited in Armenia, the country's healthcare minister Levon Altunyan said at an event dedicated to the International Day without Smoking.
"We have received an appropriate instruction from the country's leadership and are planning to submit the law to the parliament already in November 2017. This will allow reducing the number of smokers in the country by 30 to 40%," ARKA cited the minister as saying.
According to him, the ministry has submitted a strategic program implying prohibition of smoking to the government.
The program contains four components – legislative, international, advertising and psychological and healthcare.
Altunyan said that many countries of Europe and the Eurasian Economic Union had already imposed such restrictions and that this measure might come across resistance. "But we are ready for that," he said.
Taxes for tobacco products, he said, may be raised to make cigarettes more expensive, and this can strike hard at smokers' pockets. In his opinion, such a measure will force smokers to give up smoking and will fill family budgets with 250,000 drams, on average, every year.
