brianajackson
14 August 2017Trademarks

The anti-smokers’ silver bullet?

“The overall sales are not affected by plain packaging—the only impact will be between premium cigarette brands and value brands, large and small brands, and not on smoking figures themselves,” says Michiel Reerink, vice president for global regulatory strategy at Japan Tobacco International (JTI).

In 2012 Australia became the first country to introduce plain tobacco packaging, standardising all cigarettes sold to a dark brown, logo-free packet showing nothing but health warnings and listing toxic constituents.

This was declared a “last gasp of a dying industry” by the Australian health minister at the time, Tanya Plibersek.

It was hailed as a measure to nearly halve the rate of smoking in the country to below 10% by 2018.

This was met with stiff opposition from the tobacco industry, but a lawsuit accusing the Australian government of illegally taking its property was thrown out by the Australian High Court in 2012.

Almost five years have now passed since the controversial measure was introduced, with France and the UK following suit in January and May 2017, respectively.

The Australian government launched a post-implementation review of the legislation which was released last year, with both the government and the tobacco industry claiming the figures prove their respective arguments.

“The measure has begun to achieve its public health objectives of reducing smoking and exposure to tobacco smoke in Australia and it is expected to continue to do so into the future,” the government said in its review.

It stated that smoking numbers had decreased by over 2.5% and plain packaging had “contributed to this”.

However, several tobacco companies point to a study by the National Drug Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS), published in 2016.

The study stated that while smoking rates have been on a long-term downward trend, for the first time in over two decades, the daily smoking rate did not significantly decline over the most recent three-year period (2013 to 2016).

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