Insert [your response] here
Monday, August 14, 2023 at 14:00 
The Government has announced a consultation adding inserts to tobacco product to 'help' smokers quit.
According to the BBC News website, 'Cigarette packs could carry anti-smoking message inserts', which I think would be wrong.
After all, if you've ignored all the health warnings, including the grotesque images on the outside of the pack, I'm not sure a further anti-smoking message inside the pack will make much difference.
Nor do I think messages about the financial cost of smoking – and what you could do with the £2,000 a year you might save if you quit smoking – are going to change most people's minds.
What might make a difference is some constructive information about alternatives to cigarettes – reduced risk products products such as e-cigarettes, heated tobacco, and nicotine pouches.
The tone however is important. The vast majority of smokers aren't stupid and addressing them like children will almost certainly be counter-productive.
As it is, I think 'insert fatigue' might set in quite quickly once the initial novelty has gone away.
That, after all, is what happened with health warnings on packs and the subsequent grotesque images. Within a few months they're like wallpaper.
Anyway, here's Forest's response to the Government proposal:
Smokers' rights campaigners have given a cautious welcome to a UK government proposal to add pack inserts to tobacco products to encourage more smokers to quit.
Simon Clark, director of the smokers’ group Forest, said:
"If the inserts provide constructive information about quitting there is some merit in the idea.
"For example, inserting information about reduced risk products such as e-cigarettes, heated tobacco and nicotine pouches would make a lot of sense.
"Targeting consumers with more anti-smoking messages, which are on the pack already, risks warning fatigue and won't work."
"One question is, who pays for the inserts?
"If the cost is passed on to consumers, who already pay punitive rates of taxation on tobacco, it may be counter productive because more smokers will switch to illicit tobacco products that won't have inserts added."
As a result of this story I was on the Five Live phone-in this morning with Nicky Campbell who asked the question. 'Is it your duty to quit smoking?'.
What I didn't know is that the first hour of the phone-in is also broadcast on BBC Two. (Thank goodness I shaved and put on a shirt!)
Since then I've been interviewed by GB News (see below), and BBC Radio Hereford and Worcestershire, and this afternoon I'm doing TalkTV and BBC Radio WM.
If you want to have YOUR say, details of the consultation can be found here – Mandating quit information messages inside tobacco packs.
The consultation closes on October 10.
Meanwhile it's worth noting that the press release issued by the Department of Health (New inserts in cigarette packs to help smokers quit) features a quote by the CEO of ASH, Deborah Arnott.
That's quite something, is it not? If nothing else, it shows how embedded ASH is within the DHSC.
Reader Comments (3)
These messages are just a form of masturbation and they just ran out of space at the outside.
Consultation is a waste of time when an unelected lobby group using charity status as a front dictates what government must do if the public doesn't share its enthusiastic hate campaign towards smokers.
Duty to quit? Who does that sanctimonious snob think he is? We have about as much duty to quit smoking as people have to quit other harmful pursuits which are too many to mention here.
This is simply more bullying from an unelected organisation which has got far to close to government decision making in its bid to incite hatred against people who refuse to comply with an intolerant vision of a future they have decided should be forced upon everyone.
To the Government and public bully group ASH, I say just leave us alone and stop picking our pockets to fund your stupid ideas.
Aw, c’mon Simon. Useful information? Don’t be fooled!! Let's be honest - these inserts aren’t really intended to “help” smokers to stop smoking. If that was the case, ASH wouldn’t be suggesting it, because then they’d be out of a job, wouldn’t they? No, they’re a sop to ASH because they (ASH, that is) haven’t been able to get their bullying “fix” against smokers lately, largely because, in my experience, the majority of the public have simply lost interest in the great anti-smoking bully-fest as there’s now so few smokers around, and all the ones that there still are have been so good at taking themselves outside for their smokes that the few people who were irritated by cigarette smoke in the past no longer are. And, as Luc says above, they’ve pretty much run out of ideas now, so they’re simply recycling old ideas in a new format with a new spin. As you rightly say, if the multitude of scaremongering tactics already applied to the outside of tobacco packaging hasn’t worked, what do they think some jolly-hockey-sticks suggestions on the inside is going to achieve? It might be unavoidable to see the outside of cigarette packs, but I have to confess that I’ve never, in all my years of smoking, seen any smoker staring desperately into the inside of their pack to avoid looking at the outside! But, hey, if putting inserts into cigarette packs that few if any smokers will take the slightest notice of shuts ASH up for a few more years, then that’s got to be a plus in my book!