By Dr Aung Tun
Smoking is no longer a habit young Myanmar picks up late in life; it is a danger that reaches children while they are still in school. The 2016 Global School-based Student Health Survey (GSHS) found that 9.8 per cent of students aged 13 to 17 were current tobacco users, and that 70.6 per cent of those who had ever smoked had started before the age of 14. A more recent School-based Adolescent Health Survey by the Department of Medical Research found that current smoked-tobacco use among adolescents had climbed to 31.0 per cent – more than four times the 7.2 per cent recorded in 2016 – while exposure to second-hand smoke among adolescents reached 81.3 per cent, with roughly four in ten students reporting that a parent or guardian used some form of tobacco.
With about a quarter of Myanmar’s population of over 51 million classified as school-age youth, the scale of this danger is national. Adolescence is precisely the period in which children, observing smoking and betel-chewing habits around them, form the decisions that will shape their health for the rest of their lives, and research consistently shows that the younger a person is at first use, the harder that habit is to break later on. Schools reach the great majority of young people and hold their attention for most of each day, making them both an efficient and a cost-effective entry point for prevention – and the knowledge students gain there does not stay behind the school gate. It travels home to siblings, parents, and the wider community, reinforcing protective behaviour against alcohol and drug use as well.
A Foundation Laid Over Nearly Three Decades
Guarding children against this danger has never depended on a single law or a single ceremony; it rests on a foundation built brick by brick since the mid-1990s. Tobacco-danger education talks entered school health education between 1995 and 1997, and by 1997 tobacco-danger articles were included in health bulletins for grades 4 to 10. In 1998, the Health-Promoting School programme was launched in 285 townships with tobacco-free schools built in as a core component from the start, training students in the decision-making skills needed to refuse tobacco rather than simply warning them of its dangers. From 2002, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education jointly deepened this foundation through tobacco-prevention content in the Life Skills Education co-curriculum for grades 3 and 7.
On this basis, tobacco-free school plans now stand in every township, translated into daily practice: banning the sale of cigarettes, betel quid, and even tobacco-shaped toys and snacks at school shops; enforcing the sales ban around school premises in cooperation with local authorities; running exhibitions, talks, and essay or poetry competitions to raise awareness in ways that go beyond the classroom lecture; training teachers so they can model and reinforce the message themselves; and monitoring compliance at least once a year, with clear, publicised penalties for violations. Oversight flows through a structured chain – from the Department of Public Health’s School Health Division and the Department of Basic Education nationally, down through School Health Committees at state/region, district, township, and school level — which is what allows the same standard to be applied in a classroom in Kachin as in Taninthayi.
A Legal Backbone That Keeps Growing
The Control of Smoking and Consumption of Tobacco Product Law of 2006 remains the backbone of this effort, prohibiting tobacco sales within 100 feet of basic education schools, banning sales to children under 18 and the sale of single cigarettes, and outlawing tobacco advertising in any form. In recent years, this backbone has grown stronger still, through two developments that speak directly to the products young people are most likely to encounter today. In September 2025, after years of delay in the face of industry lobbying, Myanmar fully implemented standardised plain packaging, requiring all tobacco products to be sold in a uniform drab-brown pack – Pantone 448C – with pictorial health warnings covering 75 per cent of the surface, stripping cigarettes of the branding and colour that make them attractive to first-time users, including students. It made Myanmar only the third country in Asia to adopt the measure. Then, on 18 February 2026, the Ministry of Health issued Order No. 8/2026 under the Essential Supplies and Services Law, banning the import, export, sale, possession, storage, transport, distribution, use, and consumption of electronic cigarettes, heated tobacco products, electronic shisha, and their related components, including devices, batteries, chargers, and e-liquids, nationwide, making Myanmar the eighth ASEAN country to prohibit these devices.
Both measures speak directly to what happens around a school gate. Plain packaging removes the glamour that once drew a curious teenager’s eye on a shop shelf, while the e-cigarette ban closes off a channel that had begun reaching students who might never have started with an ordinary cigarette, often through flavours and discreet devices marketed to look harmless. Paired with the 100-foot sales ban already in force, these newer measures narrow, from several directions at once, the routes by which tobacco and nicotine reach young people during the very years when the habit is most likely to take hold for life. Myanmar’s move also places it alongside Brunei, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam as the eighth country in the region to close off e-cigarettes altogether, a regional signal that protecting school-age youth from new nicotine products is now treated as seriously as protecting them from cigarettes themselves.
President’s Directive
This layered effort – school-based education, legal restriction, and now product-level controls – was reaffirmed at this year’s School Health Week ceremony, where President U Min Aung Hlaing noted that all schools have been designated smoke-free and called on health staff, teachers, and parents alike to carry school health programmes forward more effectively than before, with emphasis on nurturing children who are healthy in both body and mind. The value of that call lies less in its novelty than in what it reaffirms: a foundation that has already been under construction, and strengthened by new laws, for nearly thirty years – and a reminder that a policy on paper protects no child unless health staff, teachers, and parents carry it out together, day by day, in thousands of schools at once.
Laying the Foundation for a Tobacco-Free Generation
None of this – decades of curriculum-building, a strengthened 2006 law, plain packaging, or the new e-cigarette ban – protects a single child unless it is carried out consistently in thousands of schools and reinforced by families at home, especially given how many adolescents are still exposed to second-hand smoke at home and how many still have a parent or guardian who smokes. Each layer depends on the one beneath it: curriculum without enforcement teaches facts that go unpractised; law without curriculum restricts supply without changing minds; and neither survives contact with a home environment that normalises tobacco use in front of a child every evening. It is only when all three reinforce one another – classroom, law, and household – that a school can genuinely call itself tobacco-free.
As Myanmar continues to face a rising burden of non-communicable disease, and as new nicotine products test old defences, safeguarding the coming generation at the point where habits are formed – in school, among peers, guided by teachers – remains one of the most cost-effective investments the country can make in its long-term health. Sustaining and strengthening the tobacco-free school is, in this sense, sustaining the very foundation of a tobacco-free generation.
References
1. Ministry of Health, Myanmar. School Health Manual, 2018 – Chapter 9: Establishment of Tobacco-Free Schools.
2. World Health Organization/Ministry of Health and Sports. Global School-based Student Health Survey (GSHS), Myanmar, 2016.
3. Department of Medical Research, Ministry of Health. School-based Adolescent Health Survey in Myanmar, June 2026.
4. Control of Smoking and Consumption of Tobacco Product Law, Myanmar (2006).
5. “From Warnings to Plain Packs: Myanmar’s Decisive Victory in Tobacco Control,” Myanmar Digital News, 2025
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