The tobacco industry doesn’t like the idea of plain packaging laws. They are spending a great deal of money on a large ad campaign to try to convince people that plain packaging is bad, calling it “Both sides of the issue.” I will now outline both sides of the issue below, because it doesn’t need much more than a couple sentences.
The Canadian government would prefer if people didn’t take up smoking, and is proposing packaging that is just one color with the name of the brand and the obligatory giant health warnings in order to make smoking less appealing. The tobacco industry would prefer if people did smoke, so they don’t want their packaging to be less appealing, so they want people to think plain packaging is a bad idea. That’s it, both sides of the issue clearly outlined.
The strange case is that the tobacco industry’s aggressive fight against plain packaging is inadvertently playing right into the hands of the groups who advocate for it. They are spending millions of dollars trying to convince people it’s a bad idea, aggressively trying to prevent Canada from going the way of Australia and implementing plain packaging laws. If one had any doubts of the efficacy of plain packaging laws, the sheer amount of opposition provided by the tobacco industry might have the opposite result.
Without an onslaught of tobacco industry advertising, I might actually question the necessity for plain packaging rules myself. One barely even sees cigarettes anymore, since they tend to be hidden under lock and key at many convenience stores. The warnings on current packaging are graphic and unappealing no matter how good the graphic design underneath them, and as a non-smoker I’ve never been tempted to pick up the habit either way. Anecdotally, then, the plain packaging law would not really affect me, because the gross warning label law has already had that effect. I don’t want to smoke.
Which is not to say I had any opposition to the plain packaging law, I just didn’t see it as necessary. However, thanks to the tobacco industry’s own ad campaign, I’m now all for it, because it must be effective in reducing smoking rates. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t be spending so much time, money and effort trying to convince me that it was a bad idea. Since the tobacco industry’s goal, worldwide, is to sell more cigarettes, they would not spend money on a campaign if the proposed laws were not effective in preventing people from purchasing cigarettes. There is not a more convincing argument in this case than the tobacco industry’s own fight against implementing it.
The tobacco industry should have known better, they’ve had some experience trying to get people to form the opposite opionion via advertising. I remember a series of print ads from my youth which the industry was required to pay for, an anti-smoking campaign that even at the time seemed deliberately designed to make smoking seem cool through a combination of deliberately dated slang and weird word choice. It went “Tobacco is whacko if you’re a teen.” Which suggests that tobacco is not whacko for people who are not teens, of course. As a teen at the time, I could tell that something was off about this ad, it seemed just too tone deaf, just enough out of touch to make kids like me dismiss it. And then I saw the fine print that said it was produced by a tobacco company, and it all made sense. Of course the ad was off-putting to actual teenagers, that was the goal all along. It was an attempt to make smoking seem like something those out of touch adults don’t want you to do, and there is nothing a teenager wants to do more than something a nearby adult disapproves of, especially when they use a word like “whacko.”
It’s easy to understand their desperation, tobacco simply isn’t cool anymore, and plain packaging laws are just another way to chip away at any perception of cool that tobacco may have had. You can’t smoke in public buildings, chasing smokers outside and making smokers huddle outside in the cold on a winter day makes them look sad. It’s getting increasingly uncommon in entertainment, partially because tobacco use does get called out on parental warnings now. Advertising is regulated enough that you can’t actually see cigarette companies in the public consciousness as much, and their old habit of sponsoring events is not possible now either – Formula 1, for example, used to rake in millions from cigarette advertising, but no longer does. Packaging was the last way that a cigarette company could convince people that smoking was cool. No wonder they are fighting tooth and nail to keep plain packaging from getting into practice, they’ve got nothing left. Meanwhile, more people are avoiding picking up that cigarette, including myself, and I would argue that’s a good thing.
