Australia: plain packaging for cigarettes

Tobacco industry launching resistance campaign

Australia has revealed plans to be the first nation to outline plans to force tobacco companies to use plain packaging with graphic health warnings. The initiative is scheduled for 1 July 2012, from which point tobacco products will have to be sold in the plain packaging with few or no logos, brand images or colours. Promotional text would be restricted to brand and product names in a standard colour, position, type style and size, creating a generic image.

However, the tobacco industry is showing strong resistance to the plan, and is launching a campaign to persuade people that the laws will not prevent smoking but will instead hamper small businesses and cost jobs. The campaign is being directed under the specially formed Alliance of Australian Retailers but is being supported financially by the three largest tobacco firms British American Tobacco Australia, Philip Morris Australia and Imperial Tobacco Australia.

In response to the tobacco industry’s claims, Simon Chapman, a professor of public health at the University of Sydney, sees this uprising as being an indication that the new rules will in fact reduce tobacco product sales: ‘That is the whole idea,’ he said. ”It’s being brought in because government policy is to reduce tobacco use. If the industry is squealing like that, then we’re heading in the right direction.’

Chapman et al. produced a report in 2007, ‘The case for the plain packaging of tobacco products’, which suggested that packaging has become a medium for promotional material for the tobacco industry, flying in the face of the global Framework Convention on Tobacco Control that requires nations to ban all tobacco advertising and promotion. The report reviewed the likely impact of mandatory plain packaging, and looked at internal tobacco industry statements about the importance of packaging as promotional spaces. It concluded that plain packaging for tobacco products would remove a major opportunity for the industry to promote its products to billions of people, which could have a vast impact on rates of chronic disease such as heart disease and cancer.

Sources: The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 August 2010; BBC News, 29 April 2010; The New York Times, 29 April 2010; and B. Freeman, S. Chapman and M. Rimmer, ‘The case for the plain packaging of tobacco products’ (The University of Sydney: School of Public Health, 2007).

-