‘Plain packaging deters smoking’

If you want to control tobacco consumption, force producers to package it plain and simple.

This becomes evident from the Australian experience after number of smokers declined fastest there following legally mandated introduction of plain and simple packaging.

The daily smoking rate fell 15 per cent between 2010 and Dec 2013, when one in eight Australians said they lit up at least once a day, says a Financial Times report based on the "the most comprehensive survey" undertaken since the new rules came into force.

Australia forced industries to sell cigarettes in plain packaging by law since Dec 2012.

That was the first of its kind in the world.

The National Drugs Strategy Household Survey 2013 conducted by the government collected data from almost 24,000 people across Australia between July 31 and Dec 1 in 2013.

The survey has been conducted every two to three years since 1985.

It also showed that young people delay taking up smoking, with the average age that people consume their first full cigarette rising to 15.9 years, up from 14.2 years in 2010, according to the FT report.

Photo: Reuters

The average number of cigarettes smoked per week also fell, from 111 in 2010 to 96 in 2013.

Anti-tobacco activists said the findings of the survey, which is the largest and longest running study on cigarette consumption in Australia, could encourage other countries to introduce similar laws.

"Australia’s dramatic results should lead other countries to consider plain packaging, especially the UK, Ireland and New Zealand,” said Matthew Myers, president of the US-based Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids said in a statement.

Anti-tobacco group Progga Knowledge for Progress says it can be a lesson for Bangladesh also, though the country is struggling to make rules needed for implementing the law of printing pictorial health warnings in tobacco packages.

The WHO estimates 57,000 people die of tobacco-related illness a year in Bangladesh while nearly 300,000 suffer disabilities in a country where more than 43 percent people aged 15 and above consume tobacco in some form.

Australia introduced their pictorial warning labels in 2006 after which 63 percent of non-smokers and 54 percent of ex-smokers thought the new labels “would help prevent people from starting smoking."

But the plain packaging has been at the centre of a global debate over whether laws removing all corporate branding and adding graphic health warnings can reduce smoking.

Tobacco companies claim the rules do not work and say they infringe on their intellectual property rights.

The survey results brushed aside all such speculations.

“They are the best results on smoking that I have seen. The decline in smoking is really dramatic and exceptionally encouraging – even speeding up,” said Mike Daube, a health policy professor and president of the Australian Council on Smoking and Health.

Simon Chapman, a professor in public health at the University of Sydney, told the Sydney Morning Herald that plain packaging was almost “like finding a vaccine that works very well against lung cancer”.