So Australia is going to introduce plain packaging laws from December 2012 to inhibit the promotional packaging power of cigarettes. Hmmm. That was my first reaction. Now I’ve had a chance to think about it and my reaction is – hmmm.
I’ve been trying to recall when I first started smoking, or rather started buying cigarettes. I’ve been racking my brains to think if the packaging ever made a difference to which brand I would buy or whether it swayed me into becoming a smoker in the first place and the answer is an unequivocal ‘no’.
If you were to take a casual look at the design of any cigarette packet, one thing that hits you immediately is how boring they are. Take a pack of Marlboro Lights for example (Marlboro Gold to our younger audience). It’s a white box with a kind of faint finger-print design in the background with a gold arrow on it. Now unless you’re a magpie or some kind of pan-handling purist, it’s not exactly the sexiest image ever. Does it make me want to buy Marlboro Lights? No. Do I still smoke Marlboro Lights? Yes.
Quite frankly it could have a horrific bestiality scene on the cover and I’d still buy them. Why? - Because I’m chemically addicted to nicotine. If the warning pictures on the cover don’t put people off then nothing will. I’ve yet to see a person walk into a shop and say – “Wow, what’s that packet over there with the moustachioed man with a tumour the size of a grapefruit on his neck? He looks like a cool guy. I’d like a tumour like that, 400 cigarettes please!”
If governments want to help smokers quit then why not make nicotine replacement free to all. Instead NR is just as expensive if not more so than smoking (certainly in the UK). Given a choice of quitting at a greater expense or choosing the cheaper option – what do they expect? So it boils down, in these austere times, to a money making exercise again – with the ultimate cost the lives of the smokers. Banning packaging is an Elastoplast on the problem, a conciliatory gesture that ultimately helps no-one. At best it’s preventative, as it won’t stop those already hooked on nicotine, at worst it’s a further slap in the face to smokers.
What the Australian government are doing is skirting around the issue again. Ban them in public places, make them really expensive, hide them under the counter, package them in olive green wrapping (one of my favourite colours by the way) - anything but the obvious. Anything to continue the piecemeal gestures that suggest that, they, in some small way care about the health of smokers, because if they did care, if they really were staunch in their convictions, they’d do every smoker in the world a favour – and stop selling them altogether. Next week I’ll discuss how the United States intends to stop gun crime by painting smiley faces onto ammunition. Gadzooks! MT.
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