Is Plain Packaging the Way Forward?
Abstract
Tobacco is the leading global cause of preventable death and kills nearly 6 million people and causes hundreds of billions of dollars of economic damage globally. The fact that tobacco is addictive, and that that smoking and second hand smoke cause a wide variety of diseases most notably cancers of all kind has been known for decades already. The tobacco industry has employed sophisticated lawyer, public relation firms, corporate lobbyists—and even scientists and doctors—to distort the scientific and political process.
All this makes the world a place where “nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance’s link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety—one of the most potent and common carcinogens (tobacco) known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars”.
Plain packaging entails the use of a only standard type fonts in a single colour on a plain background to provide minimum information necessary to identify a product, without the use of any logos, colours, designs, images or even stylized fonts of additional descriptive terms1(Figure 1). Thus all cigarette packets will look the same irrespective of their brand
Prohibiting the use of logos, colours, brand images and other promotional information are proven and well researched modalities of tobacco control. Plain packaging just another step in this direction-probably the best bet to blanket ban on tobacco products. The plainer the package (ie. without any logos, colours, brand images or other promotional materials) fewer is the branding elements and hence greater will be the impact of pictorial health warnings.
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