Julia Gillard, former Prime Minister of Australia, writes for the Guardian:
A family friend recently told me the story of her parents, who migrated from Greece to Australia in the 1950s. They settled in rural South Australia, where her father earned his living as a fisherman. A huge storm hit and he went missing for three days. When he finally returned safely, his wife was overjoyed – but the stress of the event did not leave her. In broken English, she consulted the local doctor and asked him about how to settle her nerves. In an age of innocence, he advised her to take up smoking. She died of lung cancer.
Al Gore, who self-effacingly told us in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, that he was the man who “used to be the next president of the United States”, recalled a similar story. He and his older sister worked summers on the family’s tobacco farm. She took up smoking as a teenager and died of lung cancer. “My father, he had grown tobacco all his life. He stopped it,” Gore said. “Whatever explanation that seemed to make sense in the past just didn’t cut it anymore.”
Australia’s health minister and then attorney general Nicola Roxon introduced plain packaging of cigarettes and then went on to fight an epic legal battle against big tobacco. She won in August 2012. The tears cried were of joy, mingled with relief.
Since 1 December 2012, cigarettes packets in Australia do not sparkle with gold or silver and do not have any other way to catch and please the eye. They’re a uniform drab colour, with most of the box taken up with the most graphic health warnings. Gruesome pictures of disease perhaps better described as real pictures of the ugly truth.
Australian plain packaging for cigarettes. (PA/Guardian)
Evidence is already available: plain packaging works. Smokers are more likely to consider giving up, and they’re also more likely to think the quality of their cigarettes has diminished. Research also shows that when young people look at plain cigarette packs, they believe the product is used by people who are less stylish and sociable, and not as attractive to mimic. This helps break the cycle of attracting young “replacement” smokers progressively taking the place of those older smokers who have quit or, too often, died.
