As promised (see previous post), I’ve been keeping an eye on the eighth European Conference on Tobacco or Health taking place in Berlin.
Findings presented at the conference are being spun to suggest Britain’s plain packaging law has been a success.
According to a jejune report funded by the British Heart Foundation and published by the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Policy Evaluation Project:
After standardised packs with larger health warnings were introduced in England, smokers were more than twice as likely to notice health warnings on packs first before branding.
Of course they were. After plain packaging was introduced there was no branding on the pack so smokers were obviously going to notice the health warnings first.
In reality there was nothing else to look at apart from the name of the brand in a standard generic font. It doesn’t mean smokers consumed fewer cigarettes or quit smoking, though.
In addition:
After the plain packing laws were introduced, 53 percent of smokers didn’t like the look of their cigarette packs, compared to 16 percent before.
Naturally! The colour of standardised packs was chosen to be as off-putting as possible. Take away the branding and what are you left with? A drab green pack featuring a large image of a diseased lung (or similar) and very little else.
I’m astounded that, post plain packaging, the percentage of smokers who ‘didn’t like the look of their cigarette packs’ is only just over half.
For plain packaging to be considered a success surely that figure should be far, far higher? Then again, perhaps it shows how unimportant the design of the pack is, relatively speaking.
Either way it has no bearing on consumption and health because there is a huge difference between not liking the look of the pack and not smoking.
As we said time and time again, it’s not the pack that matters to most smokers, it’s the sticks inside it.
Finally, here’s the third reason the report gives for declaring plain packaging to be a success in the UK:
In 2018, support for standardised packaging among adult smokers in England had increased from 32% before the law to 44% after the law was fully implemented in 2017.
To be clear, plain packaging, like the display ban, was never a major issue for most smokers.
There was opposition, naturally, because many smokers felt that it insulted their intelligence and was part of the Orwellian process of denormalisation.
In practice though standardised packs have made no difference to the overwhelming majority of smokers who quickly adapted to their introduction by largely ignoring the new design.
All the popular brands are widely available and if you want to buy them you simply ask for them by name. Who cares what the pack looks like?
Yes, the new packaging is aesthetically another step towards what David Hockney calls the “uglification of England”, but graphic health warnings on branded packs had desensitised smokers years ago, robbing standardised packs of any significant shock value.
It helped too that plain packs were introduced gradually, so I’m not sure if ‘support’ is the right word. The reality is that most smokers simply don’t care about plain packaging because any fears they might have had before their introduction have not been realised.
The elephant in the room - conveniently ignored by the ITC report - concerns smoking and health.
I have yet to see any credible evidence that smoking rates or cigarette consumption in the UK has fallen as a result of plain packaging, and without such evidence it is impossible to claim that it has had a positive impact on health.
If there was evidence do you think tobacco control campaigners would have kept quiet about it? Of course not.
Instead, the best they can come up with is the weak argument that consumers noticed that the health warnings were more prominent following the introduction of standardised packs, and didn’t like the new packs as much as the old ones.
And that’s pretty much it.
Meanwhile, if there are still people who don’t believe that plain packaging has failed, consider this:
While welcoming the findings, Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health, said that the UK needs even stricter regulation if it wants to be smoke-free by 2030.
At present, she noted, more than one in seven adults are still smoking.
“Regulation needs to go further,” she said. “It’s time to put health warnings on the cigarette sticks as well and make cigarettes as unappealing as the packs they’re sold in.”
Translation: plain packaging, like the display ban and larger health warnings, has not worked. To achieve our goal we need more radical regulation.
Serious question: would she be saying that if plain packaging was working as intended? No. Standardised packs have failed and no amount of spin can hide that very simple fact.