Why cigarette packs matter
badscience.net
badscience.net
[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/10/science/la-sci-e-cig...
[2] www.hsph.harvard.edu/centers-institutes/population-development/files/article.jphp.pdf
It is only surprising if you assume that FDA is a consumer-friendly agency, which exists to protect consumers and keep them safe. In reality I think they are heavily lobbied and influenced otherwise (via a revolving personnel door for ex.) by large drug companies, agro-businesses and big tobacco.
Cigarettes, cigars and pipes got grandfathered in. Gum and patches are medical. But I suspect their reflexive "no drugs for fun" attitude is applying to anything else.
This bill was reported in the media as an anti-smoking bill, but believe it or not, it is a pro-Big Tobacco bill. What this bill does is grandfather in the major cigarette manufacturers and protect them from all future lawsuits, since their cigarettes are now "approved by the FDA." Meanwhile, it puts up huge barriers to entry for any other competing companies, thereby guaranteeing government-supported oligopolistic profits for 100 years to come - the alternative of course is to not pass this bill, and instead watch the tobacco companies slowly die into oblivion, as they have been for the past twenty years. Instead, we are propping them up.
This bill is unnecessary, does not punish tobacco companies, and gives the FDA powers that it should never have. This bill has been a long time coming, though, and had a lot of support in both houses of Congress before passage.
Read this editorial, it is short and very informative if you really want to know what this bill is all about.
See: http://www.google.com.au/images?q=australian+cigarette+packa...
May have a look here: http://www.paleonu.com/get-started/
Has been helpful for me.
Counting calories and constant monitoring (for rewards) are the two cornerstones of my current weight loss (and it works) but I very much try to sneak a better diet in and I also really should start doing more sports.
The fact is, people will be aware that not everyone who smokes ends up looking like those images, which will help them ignore them; "It'll never happen to me", regardless of how likely it actually is.
It's an addiction after all, and I doubt if you wrapped any other drug (cocaine, meth, etc.) in a bag with these images drug-addicts would stop buying. Most likely, the anxiety of seeing something so horrific would make a drug-addict use more substance to escape from yet another worry.
I'm not into conspiracy theories, but in this case, I believe governments make too much money through cigarettes to really want to help people quit. These measures are just to make them look morally correct.
I'm convinced it's much more complicated than simple advertising. There's "peer pressure" effects, to be certain. Not the kind of peer pressure that D.A.R.E. warns you about ("hey, smoke this, everybody's doing it. you want to be cool, right?").
If you're a teenager (or college student - I started in college), it's probably more of a network effect. Hang out with people who smoke, and you're more likely to smoke yourself. After a few beers (or other inebriant of their choice), maybe it won't be so bad. Have a cigarette. Huh, nice buzz. Don't worry, I'll only smoke when I'm drinking. Before you know it (I know this isn't everyone - some people can stay social smokers just fine), you're buying a pack in anticipation of a night out. School starts stressing you out, maybe cigarettes will help. And they do, for a short period of time: a few minutes outside clearing your head with a pleasant buzz.
Of course, eventually you don't get that buzz except for the first one of the day. And for heavy smokers, they don't even get that. But it's hell if you try to quit, even with patches, gum, chantix, whatever.
I've only smoked for five years, but I've tried to quit eight times. If people ask me for cigarettes, I don't give them out - I don't know if they're in the starting stages of the addiction or not. And I'm not about to help someone else get addicted to these damn things.
I haven't bought a pack in two weeks now, mainly due to switching to e-cigarettes. If you're interested in quitting, the e-cigarettes worked better for me than the gum and patch. Don't know how long this will last (hopefully won't buy another pack ever again), but it's not been nearly as excruciating as quitting any other way.
Which I believe does more harm than good. I know plenty of smokers who get through a pack a day; do you think this is more likely to inform smokers about health risks that they're not already aware of, or is it more likely to desensitise them to these risks?
I'm also curious to know who behind this plan doesn't remember being a 10-year-old and being fascinated by everything disgusting.
To catch young people in their market, I think tobacco companies focus more on teens' need for social belonging and defining their identity.
If someone's smoking, they've already made the decision to do it, health consequences be damned. I doubt that warning labels, gross pictures or any other kind of package manipulation has a significant effect.
The primary goal in anti-smoking campaigns is to stop young people from starting in the first place - over time that's the best money spent.
Take a look at the British Columbia anti-smoking campaigns - lowest rate of new smokers in north america (IIRC).
Tobacco can't sponsor events. No more Benson & Hedges symphony of fire fireworks competition in Vancouver - now it's sponsored by a bank or something.
Stores that sell cigarettes (grocery stores, corner stores, 7-11, etc) can't have them visible to the customers in any way, and can't advertise the fact that they sell them. Basically their marketing was nipped in the bud. They can sell them, but no advertising of any kind)
And you know what? it works.
Then you reach a critical mass where there are enough people NOT smoking that it's just not cool to smoke....
that was after no smoking in bars, restaurants, any indoor public places, within X feet of the door of any store, etc......
I was curious about this, because I live in BC and realized that I hadn't seen cigarettes in a store for a long time. I'm a non-smoker, but growing up gas stations and pharmacies always had the big glass case behind the counter full of cigarettes, and it recently its seemed odd that they weren't there anymore. So I looked it up, and they're only allowed a small, plain sign with no brands or graphics, just kinds of tobacco and prices. In hindsight, I remember seeing those in one or two places, but I'd assumed it was just store policy.
It does seem to work. I think I've run across a handful of smokers at my university in three years, and many of them I only knew were smokers because they stank so much. Definitely not cool to smoke around these parts. Right now the university has just restricted the allowed smoking areas even further, and unlike when the government smoking restrictions came in, nobody really cares. This is a student body that half consists of people who hold protests over every political concern, and half 'apolitical' people who complain at length about every new fee or university restriction, so when nobody cares about a change that really says something.
It's been a wildly successful effort with long term benefits for the province.
On a related note, I found this black cigarette package, Death ™, quite cool. They're honest at least: http://www.sadanduseless.com/2009/08/black-death-cigarettes/
"DEATH™ is a responsible way to market a legally available consumer product which kills people when used exactly as intended"
(He's a psychiatrist.)
Why isn't anybody asking, then, on what grounds we think that replacing all cigarette packaging with plain white boxes wouldn't make things worse ?
You can't translate these studies into real world results at all. If you hand people two cigarette packs and say "which one looks healthier," sure, they're going to pick one. They might even pick one over the other pretty consistently.
This does not necessarily translate into real world consequences at all. You have to prove that.
All those enticing pictures of Chateaus are going to be replaced by a plain white bottle and a picture of a car crash caused by drunk driver?