March 19th, 2015:
Budget 2015: Tobacco groups breathe sigh of relief
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1a4c60fe-cd63-11e4-9144-00144feab7de.html#axzz3UpUjL3dU
Tobacco companies breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday as George Osborne stepped back from imposing a levy on their profits.
However, smokers had less reason to cheer as the UK chancellor raised taxes on cigarettes by 2 per cent above the rate of inflation in his Budget as expected.
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Shares in Imperial Tobacco, the UK’s leading seller of cigarettes, and British American Tobacco, which makes Dunhill and Lucky Strike, rose more than 2 per cent as Mr Osborne delayed making a decision on a tobacco levy.
At the Autumn Statement in December, Mr Osborne announced a consultation on a levy arguing it was “fair to ask the tobacco industry to make a greater contribution” given the harm their products cause.
However, on Wednesday he qualified his statement and said “it is essential that this is done in the most effective way”. Imperial Tobacco has said that the cost of a levy would probably be passed on to consumers in the form of higher cigarette prices. The decision removes one of a host of regulatory pressures facing the tobacco industry in the UK. A ban on smoking in cars in England will come into force this year, while the ban on cigarette displays in shops will be extended to smaller retailers in April. More importantly, branding on cigarette packs will be banned from May next year after the government passed plain packaging legislation this month. However, Mr Osborne did announce a range of measures designed to tackle the illicit, or untaxed, trade of cigarettes, including a registration scheme to track users and dealers of raw tobacco.
Chancellor George Osborne’s sixth Budget takes place less than two months before what is shaping up to be the most unpredictable general election in living memory
Antismoking charity Ash welcomed the expected duty rise but said it was disappointed by the lack of progress on a tobacco levy, a policy that was first put forward by the Labour party last year. At the Labour party’s conference in September, leader Ed Miliband called for a 15 per cent tax on tobacco profits, which he said would be spent on the NHS.
A typical premium pack of cigarettes cost £8.99 in the UK, according to the Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association, which criticised the tax increase as “a continuation of a failing tobacco tax policy”.
“The illegal market is clearly growing as price-conscious consumers seek cheaper products elsewhere,” said Giles Roca, the director-general of the TMA. Although duty increases are unwelcome for smokers, they are less of a concern for tobacco companies who typically use them as an opportunity to increase prices without attracting the ire of customers.
During the course of this parliament the proportion of tax on a premium packet of cigarettes has fallen from almost 77 per cent to 74 per cent before the Budget. In 2001, the proportion was 80 per cent. About half of the increase on a packet of cigarettes between 2006 and 2009 was due to tobacco companies increasing prices, according to researchers from the University of Bath.
BMJ publishes ‘clusterbomb’ of evidence on benefits of tobacco plain packaging, but fight with companies ‘far from over’
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/croakey/2015/03/19/bmj-publishes-clusterbomb-of-evidence-on-benefits-of-tobacco-plain-packaging-but-fight-with-companies-far-from-over/
The British Medical Journal today published the findings of a series of studies in a special Tobacco Control supplement showing that Australia’s plain packaging laws are delivering on their promise.
Cancer Council Victoria’s Professor Melanie Wakefield, whose team led the evaluation, said research shows plain packaging reduced positive perceptions of cigarette packs among teenagers and reveals that smokers were noticing and paying more attention to the graphic health warnings.
“These papers provide the first comprehensive set of results of real world plain packaging and they are pointing very strongly to success in achieving the legislation’s aims.
“These results should give confidence to countries considering plain packaging that plain packs not only reduce appeal of tobacco products and increase the effectiveness of health warnings but also diminish the tobacco industry’s ability to use packs to mislead consumers about the harms of smoking.”
All papers are available open access. See also Cancer Council Victoria’s media release.
In the post below, Jonathan Liberman, Director of the McCabe Centre for Law and Cancer, outlines the research findings but says the fight against tobacco companies is far from over – for Australia still but also for other countries, particularly those who are less resourced but vulnerable to the social and health costs of tobacco in coming decades.
That’s a big driver behind the announcement, earlier today, that Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg have created a $US4 milion anti-tobacco trade litigation fund, so countries with limited resources should not be bullied into making bad health policy choices.
“This new fund is going to help countries who are sued by the tobacco industry fight back in court and win,” Bloomberg said.
A series of papers published this week in a special supplement of the British Medical Journal’s Tobacco Control provide evidence that Australia’s tobacco plain packaging laws are achieving their public health objectives.
The first comprehensive evaluation of the legislation has found that, a year into its operation, the scheme has reduced the appeal of tobacco packs, particularly among adolescents and young adults, increased the effectiveness of health warnings, and encouraged thinking about quitting and quit attempts. The evaluation has also shown the tobacco industry’s insistence that tobacco plain packaging would lead to a collapse in prices and an explosion in illicit tobacco use is baseless.
Other countries are now following Australia’s lead. Over the last fortnight, Ireland and the UK have enacted laws for tobacco plain packaging. France, New Zealand, Norway and Turkey have all taken steps towards doing so. Other countries will follow. These are important developments in the global drive to reduce the terrible toll that tobacco takes.
The World Health Organization estimates that 6 million people die annually as a result of tobacco use. Tobacco use accounts for approximately 7 per cent of all female deaths and 12 per cent of all male deaths globally. The WHO estimates that unless strong action is taken, the annual toll will rise to 8 million deaths per year by 2030, or 10 per cent of all deaths projected to occur that year. More than 80 per cent of these deaths will be in low- and middle-income countries. Tobacco-caused death and disease are major contributors to poverty, and a giant handbrake on social and economic development.
It would be nice if the tobacco industry had by now processed its grief over the introduction of plain packaging – which it had managed to stave off for over 20 years, until Australia acted – and moved on. But alas when the tobacco industry is involved, that’s seldom the case. Nearly five years since the laws were announced, over three years since the legislation was enacted, two-and-a-half years since a resounding High Court decision dismissing the tobacco industry’s constitutional challenge, and two years since plain packaging’s full implementation, international legal challenges are ongoing.The Australian Government continues to defend legal proceedings in the World Trade Organization (WTO), and under a 1993 bilateral investment treaty between Australia and Hong Kong. Every country that so much as intimates that it is considering tobacco plain packaging is subjected to a barrage of legal threats should it dare to proceed.
Litigating, and threatening litigation, have become just another part of the tobacco industry’s business operations. The strategy has a number of aims: make what would otherwise be very cheap policy interventions to reduce death and disease expensive; drain governments’ resources; delay the implementation of laws that will reduce the industry’s profits; and bully and intimidate governments out of enacting these laws at all. It’s a grim business, at its worst when this behaviour is inflicted on the least-resourced governments, which are both in greatest need of strong tobacco control laws to protect the health of their people, and least able to respond to the tobacco industry’s modus operandi.
It’s worth trying to imagine for a moment how a government official in a low-resource country might feel upon receiving a letter, a phone call or a visit from the tobacco industry or its high-powered lawyers threatening litigation, being bombarded with an alphabet soup of treaties and cases that he or she has never heard of, ill-equipped to recognise how disingenuous the claims may be. Thankfully, these officials can now receive support, through the networks of knowledge and expertise that have developed over the last few years around litigation experiences like Australia’s, but the disparity in resources remains vast.
The overwhelming view among those with relevant legal expertise (and not on the tobacco industry’s payroll) is that the Australian Government is on solid legal ground. The laws are an exercise of Australia’s sovereign power to regulate to protect public health, do not discriminate between domestic and imported products, are based on evidence, and have behind them the legal and political force of the global public health treaty, the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), as well as implementation guidelines and other decisions adopted by consensus of the States Parties to the treaty, and other international instruments including the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health.
In the case of the investment treaty challenge, the case could be thrown out before getting to the merits of the arguments on the basis that the suing company, the Hong Kong-based Philip Morris Asia, only bought into the Australian business after the Australian Government announced that it would introduce plain packaging laws, and should not be allowed to use the Australia-Hong Kong treaty to pursue a legal challenge to these very laws.
International trade and investment laws are not supposed to promote trade and investment for their own sake and at any cost. And they are not supposed to be cynically used to prevent governments from protecting the health of their citizens.
The international legal challenges to Australia’s tobacco plain packaging still have a way to run. The panel considering the WTO cases has said that it won’t hand down its report until the first half of 2016 at the earliest. A decision on whether the investment challenge should be allowed to proceed to a hearing on the merits of the case is some months away.
The resolution of the cases will likely have profound implications for global health and sustainable development in the twenty-first century, and for the WTO and the international investment law system. There is a lot at stake.
Enormous credit is due to successive Australian Governments – Labor and Coalition – for adopting the laws and vigorously defending them, and to other countries for following Australia’s lead. Let’s hope that WHO’s projection that the death toll from tobacco this century could reach one billion people is nowhere near realised.
Jonathan Liberman is Director of the McCabe Centre for Law and Cancer, a joint initiative of Cancer Council Victoria and the Union for International Cancer Control, and a Senior Fellow of the Melbourne Law School. Jonathan is a lawyer with over fifteen years’ experience in legal and policy research, advice, training and technical support relating to cancer control at both domestic and global levels.
The McCabe Centre’s mission is to contribute to the effective use of the law for cancer prevention, treatment, supportive care and research. It is a WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control knowledge hub. With support from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Cancer Council Australia, the McCabe Centre runs an intensive legal training program for government lawyers from low- and middle-income countries on the use of law to prevent and control cancer and other non-communicable diseases
WHO praises India for tobacco warnings
http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/who-praises-india-for-tobacco-warnings/
In India, also, lobbying to stall the implementation of the notification is afoot. The final notification alerting the industry is yet to be issued though it normally comes out a month in advance.
The move mandating 85 per cent pictorial health warnings on tobacco product packages from April 1 has earned India praise from the WHO on the opening day of the 16th World Conference on Tobacco or Health.
“It is beautiful that India has notified the regulation. That is the biggest pictorial warning in the world. Whatever assistance India needs in that direction, we are willing to provide it to them,” said Dr Douglas Bettcher, director, WHO department for prevention of non-communicable diseases. The decision was notified in October last year and comes into effect next month.
WHO director general Margaret Chan described it as a move that showed “political will”. “We would urge and encourage India to notify the regulation announced last summer,” she said, expressing concerns over the emerging trend of big tobacco companies dragging governments to court for attempting to regulate tobacco products. Philip Morris International had dragged Uruguay to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes when the country tried to introduce 80 per cent pictorial warnings on tobacco packets.
In India, also, lobbying to stall the implementation of the notification is afoot. The final notification alerting the industry is yet to be issued though it normally comes out a month in advance.
Earlier this month, Dilipkumar Gandhi, the BJP MP from Ahmednagar in Maharashtra, wrote to Union Health Minister J P Nadda saying that no country, except Thailand, has such stringent warning provisions. “Since the above issue is already under examination by the Committee on Subordinate Legislation, and secretary health was appeared before the committee on 4th February 2015. The matter is being examined regarding implementation of the new notification w.e.f 1.4.2015 and its impact on the workers and manufacturers of bidi/cigarette and tobacco industry in India and its financial impact as a whole on the revenue, it will be in the fitness of things that the above notification implementation w.e.f 1.4.2015 is kept in abeyance,” Gandhi, chairman of the committee, wrote to Nadda on March 2.
The FICCI has also written to the Health Ministry questioning the decision to increase the size of pictorial warnings, arguing it would hurt the domestic cigarette industry and that a large number of non-cigarette tobacco products would escape the net.
However, pressing for the bigger warnings, a group of anti-tobacco activists led by NCP MP Supriya Sule met Nadda on Wednesday.
Though the WHO chose not to comment about the internal churnings in India on the pictorial warning, Dr Bettcher said: “Bidis and smokeless tobacco cannot have different levels of taxation. That is a disturbing trend in India and in many other countries.”
WHO wants tobacco firms ‘out of business’
http://www.skynews.com.au/news/world/europe/2015/03/19/who-wants-tobacco-firms–out-of-business-.html
World Health Organisation chief Margaret Chan has urged global action to drive tobacco companies ‘out of business’ and hailed progress in tackling smoking in many countries. Speaking at the World Conference on Tobacco or Health in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday, Chan welcomed steps taken by countries, led by Australia, to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes.
Tobacco companies ‘use all sorts of tactics including funding political parties, individual politicians to work for them … There is nothing they would not exploit to undermine the governments’ resolve and determination to protect their own people,’ Chan told reporters. ‘It’s going to be a tough fight … (but) we should not give up until we make sure that the tobacco industry goes out of business,’ she said. Despite a decline in the number of smokers in many countries, more needs to be done to curb tobacco use in order to meet the global target of a 30 per cent reduction in consumption by 2025, participants said.’ Largely thanks to legislative measures, smoking has plummeted in several countries,’ Chan told the meeting, referring to the latest WHO report showing the proportion of men who smoke is going down in 125 countries. Chan said non-smoking ‘is becoming the norm’. According to the WHO, one person dies every six seconds due to tobacco – nearly six million people each year. Participants at the conference have warned that unless urgent action is taken, the annual death toll could rise to eight million by 2030. Chan voiced support for measures taken by Australia, Ireland, and most recently Britain, to introduce plain cigarette packaging, despite ‘being intimidated by tobacco industry threats of lengthy and costly litigation. ‘But ‘the train has already left the station. The evidence base is strong, empirical, and comes from well-qualified, respected, and credible sources … We know that plain packaging works. ‘Smoking rates have fallen in Australia since it introduced plain packaging legislation in 2012, although tobacco companies have blamed the decline on tax hikes. Similar legislation passed in Ireland last month has been fully implemented, while Britain is set to bring in such measures in May next year.
New tobacco atlas details scale, harms of tobacco epidemic
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-03/acs-nta031815.php
The Tobacco Atlas, Fifth Edition (“The Atlas”), and its companion mobile app and website TobaccoAtlas.org, were unveiled today by the American Cancer Society and World Lung Foundation at the 16th World Conference on Tobacco or Health. The Atlas graphically details the scale of the tobacco epidemic; the harmful influence of tobacco on health, poverty, social justice, and the environment; the progress being made in tobacco control; and the latest products and tactics being used by the industry to protect its profits and delay and derail tobacco control.
The Fight Against The Tobacco Epidemic Is At A Critical Stage
Strong tobacco control laws have led to reductions in smoking prevalence but much remains to be done. The Atlas’ authors conclude that the battle against tobacco has reached a critical stage:
- The tobacco industry is committing unprecedented resources to litigate, threaten, and interfere with efforts to introduce, implement, and enforce tobacco control.
- The increase in tobacco users in the world’s most populous countries is outpacing the global impact of tobacco control. There are now over 1 billion smokers in the world.
- Over 300 million people use smokeless tobacco, and the use of other alternative tobacco products, like water pipes, is growing.
- Over 5.8 trillion cigarettes were smoked in 2014. Increased consumption in China (where average consumption is 22 cigarettes a day) offsets declines in other countries.
- 90% of the world’s population live in countries that have ratified the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), but only 10% are covered by comprehensive tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship (TAPS) bans and only 16% by comprehensive smoke-free laws.
- Progress made in de-normalizing smoking may be reversed by the increasing prevalence of e-cigarettes and other alternative tobacco products.
- Tobacco is killing more than half and as many as two-thirds of tobacco users.
- Unprecedented Activity By The Tobacco Industry Is Preventing Progress
- The Atlas reveals the extent of the tobacco industry’s expanding and well-resourced array of tactics to preserve its profits, to hide the truth from the public and to influence or derail regulation. Among the top six transnational tobacco companies – accounting for 85% of all cigarettes smoked globally – profits have reached US$44.1 billion or around US$7,000 for every tobacco-related death, up from US$6,000 per death when the last edition of The Atlas was published in 2012. These industry tactics include:
- Aggressively targeting developing economies in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.
- Increasing prices above and beyond taxes in 146 countries between 2008 and 2012 so consumers blame governments for higher prices while tobacco companies profit.
- Funding and promoting misleading research regarding measures like plain packaging, display bans, pack size restrictions, smoke-free laws, and tobacco taxes.
- Running a two-year media and social media campaign valued at nearly AUS$3.5 million to try to prevent the adoption of plain packaging in Australia and having 450 people lobbying to prevent plain packaging in the UK (both BAT).
- Increased lobbying. Philip Morris International spent GB£5.25 million lobbying the EU in 2014. In 2012, the industry spent over US$26million on lobbying in the USA.
Increasing its use of legal action or the threat of legal action, particularly citing international trade and investment agreements, to try to stop tobacco control including:
- Graphic warnings in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Uruguay, and the US
- Plain packaging in Australia; with threats against the UK and Ireland
- Pack-size restrictions in Peru
- A ban on additives and flavorings in Brazil
- The EU Tobacco Products Directive
- Retail display bans in Norway and Scotland
- Tobacco marketing bans in the Philippines and South Africa
- Smoke-free laws in Pakistan and the Philippines
- Bans on sales of tobacco products near educational establishments and the sale of gutkha and pan masala containing tobacco in India
- A health law in Indonesia.
- Tobacco Industry Tactics Are Causing Economic, Social and Environmental Harm
Tobacco use costs the global economy over US$1 trillion according to The Atlas and may have an economic impact of as much as US$2.1 trillion according to other sources. Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) represent over 80% of tobacco users and tobacco-related deaths, so an increasing proportion of this cost is born by people who can least afford it. Negative economic, social, and environmental consequences of tobacco include:
- Development funding is going up in smoke. In 2012, LMICs received a total of US$133 billion in development aid, while spending more than double that amount, US$350 billion, on tobacco products.
- From 2000-2011, nearly a quarter of global growth in LMICs resulted from health improvements. The benefit was most marked in the Middle East and North Africa, where it contributed 35%, and Sub-Saharan Africa, where it contributed nearly 70%. Increasing tobacco-related ill health will be a drain on economic growth.
- All forms of tobacco use disproportionately burden the poorest and increase socioeconomic health inequalities.
- Female tobacco use – often linked by the tobacco industry to emancipation and sophistication – has increased rates of lung cancer so it now kills more women than breast cancer; worryingly, there are 24 countries where girls smoke more than boys compared to just two countries where more women smoke than men.
- Maternal tobacco use also causes health harms and increases the lifetime risk of health conditions to infants and children.
- Increased tobacco use in Africa in recent years means lung cancer is now the most common cause of premature death among men.
- In 12 of the 25 top tobacco leaf-producing countries, tobacco cultivation co-exists alongside undernourishment rates which exceed 10%. This is most acute in four African nations: Zambia (43%), Mozambique (37%), Tanzania (33%), and Zimbabwe (31%).
- Tobacco causes air, land, and water pollution. 200,000 hectares of forest are lost every year to tobacco cultivation and curing – contributing to climate change – and cigarette butts are the most commonly discarded piece of waste worldwide. 4.5 trillion butts, weighing 1.69 billion pounds, end up as toxic rubbish.
- Creating A Future Of Missed Opportunities
Without change, governments around the world will miss targets to improve health and opportunities to reduce the harm of tobacco:
- Tobacco will remain on track to kill 1 billion people this century.
- Governments will miss the Sustainable Development Goals target of reducing premature deaths from NCDs by one-third by 2030.
- Governments will miss the WHO Global NCD Action Plan target of a 30% reduction in tobacco use prevalence by 2025.
- Smoking has already prevented countries from meeting Millennium Development Goals related to mortality associated with tuberculosis (TB). It will be 2029 before any region (the Americas) meets its goal while smoking is still prevalent. In the Western Pacific and Africa, TB mortality goals will never be achieved while smoking is prevalent.
- Smokers with HIV will continue to lose more than twice as many years of life as non-smokers – 12.3 years compared with 5.1 years.
- Bolder, Faster Action Is Needed
The Atlas authors conclude that bolder, faster action is needed to reduce tobacco use:
- Governments should re-invest income from tobacco taxes. 0.69% of tobacco excise tax revenue is spent on tobacco control, and 96% of that in high-income countries.
Donors’ development assistance should more closely match tobacco-related harm. Only US$68 million was spent in 2011, but US$600 million per year would deliver four “best buy” tobacco control interventions to all LMICs; that is only 11 cents per person and just less than 0.17% of what citizens of LMICs spent on tobacco products in 2013. - Governments should ignore tobacco industry threats and enact and enforce comprehensive tobacco control measures at the highest levels of best practice.
- Governments should implement comprehensive TAPS bans, with immediate effect. The Atlas reveals that one-third of youth experimentation with tobacco occurs as a result of exposure to tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship, and 78% of youth worldwide report regular exposure to such tobacco marketing.
- All governments should legislate to introduce best practice large graphic pack warnings and are encouraged to follow Australia, Ireland and the UK in legislating for plain packaging.
- Greater use should be made of mass and social media to educate, inform, and encourage quitting. An ad campaign in Senegal increased calls to the national quitline by 600%, while a video in Thailand led to a 40% increase in calls to the national quitline and more than 5 million YouTube views within 10 days.
- Health experts, tobacco users, and governments cannot assume that e-cigarettes will help end the tobacco epidemic. Nearly half of US adult e-cigarette users are dual users, and youth uptake is of real concern from a health and “gateway” perspective.
- Tobacco control advocates should engage and collaborate with colleagues across social, developmental, economic and environmental disciplines to make a multi-faceted case for stronger tobacco control.
- Quotes From Leadership
“Whether it’s the link between tobacco and increasing rates of lung cancer among women or the ever-increasing number of health conditions and deaths related to tobacco use, the health and economic case for reducing tobacco use has never been clearer,” said John R. Seffrin, PhD, chief executive officer, American Cancer Society. “We encourage public health advocates; colleagues across legal, environmental, and developmental specialisms; governments; economists; educators; and the media to use this vital tool to tell people the truth about how a cohesive, well-funded tobacco industry is systematically causing preventable deaths, destroying the environment, and crippling economies – all for its own profit. These truths will help us create support for the change so bitterly opposed by the tobacco industry.”
“There is a perception that we know everything about tobacco and the harm it causes, but the truth is that every edition of The Tobacco Atlas reveals something new about the industry, its tactics and the real harm it causes,” said Peter Baldini, Chief Executive Officer, World Lung Foundation. “Our challenge, as a global community interested in health and development, is to raise awareness, to bring new voices to the table, to encourage governments to implement comprehensive tobacco control measures as quickly as possible, and to help them stand firm against industry threats and interference. Our fervent hope is that the next Atlas will report the fruits of such a strategy.”
Australia’s Plain Packaging is Working: First Comprehensive Evaluation of World-First Tobacco Laws Released
http://medianet.multimediarelease.com.au/bundles/00c88263-2031-4fd8-bc0d-d7ee8dd8ed0b
The introduction of plain packaging of tobacco products in Australia is delivering on its promise to restrict the ability of the pack to create appeal, according to the first comprehensive evaluation of the legislation.
Published in a special supplement to the British Medical Journal, fourteen peer-reviewed papers examine various aspects of the implementation and the impact it has on the community, including young people and adult smokers.
Key findings of the evaluation include:
• Plain packaging has delivered on its aim to reduce appeal of packs, particularly with adolescents and young adults
• There was no evidence of an increase in the consumption of illicit “cheap white” cigarettes
• The impact of plain packaging extends beyond expectation with studies suggesting the initiative encourages thinking about quitting and quit attempts
Cancer Council Victoria’s Professor Melanie Wakefield, whose team led the evaluation, said research shows plain packaging reduced positive perceptions of cigarette packs among teenagers and reveals that smokers were noticing and paying more attention to the graphic health warnings.
“These papers provide the first comprehensive set of results of real world plain packaging and they are pointing very strongly to success in achieving the legislation’s aims.
“These results should give confidence to countries considering plain packaging that plain packs not only reduce appeal of tobacco products and increase the effectiveness of health warnings but also diminish the tobacco industry’s ability to use packs to mislead consumers about the harms of smoking.”
Study co-leader Dr Michelle Scollo examined claims made by the tobacco industry concerning prices and illicit tobacco, noting:
“The tobacco industry has been very vocal in its concerns that plain packaging would result in a collapse in prices and increased use of illicit tobacco – these studies found no evidence of either of these effects, and despite an increase in use of value brands, a clear indication of increased prices across the board.”
Cancer Council Victoria CEO Mr Todd Harper said the research debunked the scare tactics of the tobacco industry which has been tirelessly lobbying politicians and decision makers with exaggerated tales of black markets, criminal gangs and a proliferation of cheap cigarettes.
“The pack is one of the last pillars of tobacco industry marketing, and in jurisdictions without plain packaging the pack will continue to be used as an unscrupulous tool to keep and attract customers.”
Mr Harper said this was especially dangerous in a time when marketing innovations of packaging could evolve to include music, touch and smell to increase appeal.
Professor Melanie Wakefield, Dr Michelle Scollo and Todd Harper are available for interview, as is another study author, Kylie Lindorff.
For further information, or interviews, please contact:
Edwina Pearse on 0417 303 811 or edwina.pearse@cancervic.org.au, or Thea Cargill on 0429 000 450 or thea.cargill@cancervic.org.au
Cancer Council Victoria is a non-profit organisation that has been leading the fight against all cancers for 79 years in the areas of research, patient support, cancer prevention and advocacy. Visit www.cancervic.org.au for details.