Generics, cigarettes

The Australian High Court, the equivalent of our Supreme Court, made a landmark ruling on Wednesday upholding a law requiring the same olive-brown plain packaging for all cigarette brands. This means no colors or logos, and the brand name appearing in a small generic font. Large graphic health warnings, already found on cigarette packs, will still appear on the new plain packaging.

Advocates of plain packaging are convinced this will be a major step to reduce cigarette consumption. The existing colorful cigarette packs, sometimes with deceptive wording like “extra mild,” entice young people to take up smoking and push smokers to use more of the tobacco.

Australia passed a law last year requiring this plain packaging, but cigarette companies took the case to court, saying the law was unconstitutional because it “extinguished” their brands and logos without compensation. The High Court upheld the constitutionality of the law, which will take effect on Dec. 1.

Antitobacco activists throughout the world consider this High Court ruling a major victory, and hope other countries will take similar action. I know it’s unlikely we’ll have a similar law in the near future, but I thought I’d write about this issue to show how marketing strategies, including packaging, impacts public health.

Plain, low status

The plain-packaging policy was first proposed as early as 1989 in New Zealand, where a government commission recommended that cigarettes be produced only in plain white packages. In the 1990s, a Canadian parliamentary committee reviewed different studies on cigarette packaging and concluded that there was enough evidence that plain packaging would reduce tobacco consumption.

Since no country has yet implemented plain packaging, the research conducted on this topic has been experimental, where research participants were asked to give their views on cigarette packaging, including hypothetical plain packages. Not surprisingly, people preferred the existing packages with all their colors. Young adults were also asked to use plain cigarette packs and to describe their feelings afterwards. The young adults said plain packages made them feel more negative, both toward the pack and smoking itself.  Users tried to hide or cover their plain packs, smoked less when they were with other people, and even thought more about quitting.

The Australian High Court ruling was released just as I was planning to write about an intriguing new study on tobacco use among young Americans published in the US Centers for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The report notes that cigarette consumption has been declining through the years but that cigar consumption has increased. The authors of the report note that cigars are not subject to FDA (Food and Drug Administration) regulation, which means these are taxed at lower rates and are therefore cheaper and more affordable for young people. Cigar manufacturers also offer products with flavorings, and get away with misleading descriptions on their packaging like “light” and “low tar.” I don’t know if Australia plans to have cigars in plain packaging as well.

Tobacco companies have reacted strongly against plain packaging, citing all kinds of arguments from the packages being unconstitutional to the policy possibly leading to counterfeit products. There have even been arguments that because of the plain packages, cigarette prices would drop, and therefore encourage more smoking.

Consumer activists like myself know only too well that when industries protest legislation, it’s mainly because it cuts down on their profits. The arguments that cigarette companies use against plain packaging sound exactly like those used by drug companies when the Philippines, in a more courageous time, pushed a generic-drugs policy. This was back in 1989, when a law was passed and drug companies went to court, threatening a shortage in medicines and warning about counterfeit products. Among the provisions of the law was an important one about packaging: The generic name of the drug will appear prominently, with the brand name below it. The rationale for this policy on packaging and labeling was to educate people about medicines—i.e., that there is an internationally recognized generic name for each medicine, which is then produced under different brand names with widely varying prices. The idea here was for consumers to learn to see through the hype of advertising, and to move away from brand-name loyalties.

The Generics Law passed and a market for low-cost generic drugs has grown through the years, as well as people’s awareness of medicines. Progress has been slow, but our Generics Law is still internationally hailed as a piece of model legislation.

The generic-drugs policy was intended to promote affordable choices for consumers. The plain-cigarette law is different: The Australian government argues that it has the right to regulate cigarettes like other products that are harmful to human health—such as rat poison. (I couldn’t help but think, though, that rat poison packages can be quite powerful.)

Young smokers

There’s a sense of racing against time in all these antitobacco efforts. Every two years, the United States conducts a nationwide survey of tobacco use among students from Grades 6 to 12 (aged about 12 to 18), knowing that about 90 percent of adult smokers in that country are known to begin smoking before the age of 18, and that the tobacco habit translates to 443,000 deaths there from cigarette (and, I presume, cigar) smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke.

I am certain antismoking campaigns in the Philippines have been making headway, but am constantly reminded of grim realities, seeing young people, sometimes even children, smoking. Even at the University of the Philippines, young students are still picking up the habit, and flaunting it, smoking away even under “No Smoking” signs. (A Civil Service Commission directive actually requires all government institutions, including the entire campus of UP and all state universities, to be smoke-free, meaning there should not even be a smoking area.)

Smoking remains glamorous, and colorful packages—the designs are products of expensive marketing research—contribute to their appeal to young people. The addiction isn’t just to nicotine but also to brand names, with all their connotations of being chic, manly or feminine, even “rich” (the irony being that it is the upper classes who are dropping the habit in larger numbers).

Those interested in looking up the journal articles on plain-packaging research can visit this site: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2590906/?tool=pmcentrez. To read about tobacco use among young Americans, go to www.cdc.gov and do a search for “MMWR tobacco high school 2011.”

* * *

E-mail: mtan@inquirer.com.ph