In its most recent incarnation, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) war on tobacco has expanded its regulations to include the labels and advertisements of cigarettes. The new initiative seeks to scare potential smokers away from a pack with sharp messages and poignant depictions of the negative effects of cigarette smoke. The warnings are as unwavering as the staunch opponents of tobacco, including grim messages such as: “WARNING: Smoking can kill you.”

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the FDA has recently issued a proposal entitled “Required Warnings for Cigarette Packages and Advertisements.” This measure would require tobacco companies to put bolder warning labels and graphic images on cigarette packaging and advertising.
For many, the proposed act would signify a great victory for health in America.
“Today, (the) FDA takes a crucial step toward reducing the tremendous toll of illness and death caused by tobacco use by proposing to dramatically change how cigarette packages and advertising look in this country,” said Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D., Commissioner of the FDA, according to The New York Times. “When the rule takes effect, the health consequences of smoking will be obvious every time someone picks up a pack of cigarettes.”
This initiative is a part of the HHS tobacco control strategy and is an extension of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. Previous restrictions have focused on preventing the sale, distribution, and general access of cigarettes to people under the age of 18. According to the FDA, the proposal will push regulations into unprecedented territory: to expand preventative measures to include blunt warnings about the repercussions of habitual cigarette smoking.
The FDA will choose nine different warning labels and images explaining the negative health effects of tobacco use. The labels include warnings such as “WARNING: Cigarettes cause fatal lung disease,” and “WARNING: Smoking during pregnancy can harm your baby.”
Of course, a picture says a thousand words.
The images chosen by the FDA are forthright, full color, and range from illustrations of a person dying in a hospital bed to a picture contrasting healthy and cancerous lungs. The bottom line of their message: cigarette smoke kills — in horrible ways.
“Every day, almost 4,000 youths try a cigarette for the first time and 1,000 youths become regular, daily smokers,” said Kathleen Sebelius, secretary for the U.S. Department of HHS. “Today marks an important milestone in protecting our children and the health of the American public.”
The new anti-smoking initiative is one of deterrence, prevention and education. It is directed at the young, attempting to mold a smoke-free generation by depicting the harsh reality of cigarette-related illnesses.
According to HHS, tobacco use is the leading cause of premature and preventable death in the U.S., responsible for 443,000 deaths each year. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the prevalence of smoking among U.S. adults (18 years or older) has declined from 24.7 percent in 1997 to 20.6 percent in 2009. However, tobacco use is still particularly high among low-income groups and those with limited social mobility.
People will indeed smoke, despite the risk or the cost of a pack.
“I don’t think it’s really going to make a difference,” said first-year Alice Gushue. “I think people are aware of the dangers of smoking and still choose to smoke.”
Some feel that the new law will result in further alienation and stigmatization of smokers. When cigarettes are portrayed as a purely reckless and self-deprecating endeavor, the smokers themselves are labeled as such.
“Smoking is often a habit picked up at an early age,” senior Zack Pinsky said. “Although it has a vice connected to it, nicotine is a serious addiction. One would not berate a heroin user for being addicted. It is a matter of addiction, which is a serous issue, not something to be mocked or looked down upon.”
The topic of tobacco use and control is a controversial issue for Americans. It is coming to the forefront of health issues in our generation and the government is seeking input from the nation, as it begins to take new legislative steps.
The FDA is looking for opinions and feedback on the labels and images being chosen for the proposed rule. According to HHS, these opinions can be submitted by mail or online between Nov. 12 and Jan. 11, 2011. The final regulations will be issued on June 22, 2011, and will take effect no later than 15 months after the requirements are set.
When they do take effect, these labels will be loaded with meaning. For some, it will be a triumph over corporation and a commitment to a cleaner, healthier America. For others, it will be a slight loss in profit. Undeniably, it will act as a glaring reminder of the health risks and social stigma of smoking cigarettes for smokers everywhere in the nation.

Health Canada is being criticized for its “senseless policy” on tobacco warning labels after delaying plans to force tobacco companies to increase the size of health warnings on cigarette packages. “We should all be outraged about the suspension of efforts to renew tobacco warning labels,” reads an editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, released Monday. The new labels were supposed to cover 50 to 70 per cent of the package’s surface, and have updated, more graphic images.

The official process to modernize Canada’s tobacco product labels began in August 2004, nearly four years after Canada became the first country in the world requiring tobacco companies to cover half the pack with government-mandated graphic warning labels.

“Ten years ago, Canada was a leader,” the Canadian Cancer Society said in a statement. “Abandoning this labelling policy may be a setback for efforts in Canada, particularly as labels are now the government’s only remaining mass communication initiative warning of the dangers of smoking.”

Health Canada moved to mandate new and bigger warnings after its own public-opinion research showed current warnings, which have been on packages since 2000, were no longer eliciting strong reactions from smokers.

Independent research pointed to the same trend, showing a decline in the effect of warning labels in Canada over time.

Some countries, such as Thailand and Uruguay have updated their labels several times over the past five years, according to the Cancer Society.

There were murmurs, among industry executives, of the impending label changes more than one year ago. And with Health Canada apparently ready to implement the new labels, the regulations were expected to be tabled in January 2010.

In reaction to the criticism, government said it hasn’t abandoned the planned regulations, and while it continues to review research on health warning messages, it isn’t ready to move forward.

“Health Canada reviews information to determine whether new evidence has emerged clearly linking tobacco usage to specific diseases,” Stephane Shank, a spokesman for Health Canada, said in a written statement to Postmedia News. “As well, the impact and possible effectiveness of any new messages on the smoking behaviour of Canadians needs to be determined before new messages are considered.”

Smoking is the practice where a substance is burned and smoke is inhaled, tobacco the main offender is followed by, opium and cannabis. The most widespread method of smoking today is through cigarettes, whether through a hand rolled paper with tobacco inside or through industrially manufactured cigarettes.
Tobacco smoking is the most common form while opium and cannabis are far less popular. About 1 billion people in the world practice this unhealthy habit. The English language adopted the term smoking in the late 18th century, before than it was called drinking smoke.

The history of Smoking dates to 5000-3000 BC when tobacco was grown as an agricultural product; it was used in cleansing rituals by religious leaders. Smoking tobacco and or other hallucinating drugs were used to make contact with the spiritual world. The earlier civilizations also believed that tobacco was a gift from god and exhaled smoke was capable of carrying the prayers and thoughts to heavens.
In 1612, John Rolfe became the first settler to successfully raise tobacco as a cash crop in Virginia, US. Its demand quickly grew and was referred to as brown gold. Frenchman Jean Nicot was the pioneer who introduced tobacco in France from where it spread to England. The word nicotine is derived from the name of the Frenchman Jean Nicot.
Initially like tea, coffee and opium, tobacco was also used for its medicinal purposes but later its use as a medicine subsided and it was only used for recreational purposes. Murad IV, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, was the first human in history to impose a ban on the use of tobacco; he declared it to be a threat to health and morality of the Ottoman society.
Smoking is a very hard and difficult habit to break since a cigarette contains nicotine, which is extremely addictive, and there is every reason to believe it is more so today.
People begin smoking for a variety of reasons, some believe that they look cool and they use it as a mean to attract attention, some start because their friends and family members smoke and some start because of stress and smoking will overcome that stress whether at work, home or school. Statistics, however, show that 9 out of 10 smokers begin before the age of 18.
Tobacco smoking is of two basic types depending upon the willingness to inhale smoke. A person will be called an active smoker, if he is smoking by his own choice whereas the passive smoker is a non smoker who inhales the smoke by being in the presence of an active smoker.
It has been acknowledged world wide that both types of smoke inhaling are extremely dangerous to human health.
Some interesting facts about the hazards of smoking are:
· About 111,000 people die annually due to active or passive smoking.
· One person dies in every 5 minutes with smoking related diseases.
· About 40% of the total number of fires in a year is caused by smoking accidents.
· Tobacco is most widely grown cash crop in most countries; hence less land is available for growing food crops.
· Burning tobacco causes pollution, since it emits 4000 dangerous gases into the atmosphere.
· Cigarettes produce two gases, methane and carbon dioxide, which are responsible for global warming through green house effect.
· Nicotine increases the blood pressure thus increasing the chances of a heart attack and stroke.
· Chest infection and bronchitis leads to lung cancer, ultimately harming the life of the smoker and the people around him.
· Passive smoking can cause sore eyes, sneezing, runny nose, headaches, coughing, wheezing and hoarseness.
· Children of smokers are prone to a very high risk of getting all those diseases that a smoker may have and sometimes even worse because they have a lower level of immunity than adults.
· There is a ten years reduction in the average life of a smoker as compared to a non smoker.
· It can cause cracked lips, yellowish teeth, sores and mouth ulcers.
· A smoker lacks stamina and can not actively participate in sports.
China, India and Brazil are the top three tobacco producing nations. Tobacco has been a principal cash crop for decades hence a great deal of research is being carried out on biological and even a genetic level. The first virus identified by humans was a tobacco mosaic virus; it is an RNA virus that infects plants especially tobacco and other members of the family solanaceae.
The world no tobacco day is celebrated on May 31 it is a global celebration with a view to achieve a 24 hour period of abstinence for smokers. Global attention is also drawn towards the ill-effects of the use of tobacco and the number of deaths world wide from tobacco use are also brought into the light.
Smoking produces two green house gasses that are altering our atmosphere and are directly related to climate change; it is just one more challenge for the world to over come.

From: www.starcitynews.com

By 1 July 2011 all cigarette packs in Norway shall carry a pictorial health warning.
-Research shows that pictorial warnings are far more efficient than textual warnings. Pictorial warnings are easier to remember, communicate health risks more clearly and increase the motivation to quit smoking, says State Secretary Ellen Birgitte Pedersen at the Ministry of Health and Care Services.

A public consultation was carried out earlier this year, and the proposed pictorial health warnings were supported by nearly all stakeholders.

The new regulations will come into force 1 January 2010. Cigarettes must carry pictorial health warnings by 1 July 2011 at the latest, while other tobacco products must carry such warnings by 1 January 2012.

Pictorial health warnings will reduce the advertising effect of brands and logos on tobacco products. Even though the Norwegian Parliament (Stortinget) has banned the visible display of tobacco products at points of sale from 1 January 2010, the tobacco product health warnings will still be visible after purchase.

The EU has developed a library of pictorial health warnings, and the selection of pictorial warnings to be used in Norway has been based upon submissions to the public hearing and recommendations from the Directorate for Health.

Regjeringen

Matthew Myers , president, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, worked closely with the US Congress to draft and enact a historic new law governing the manufacturing, marketing and sale of tobacco products in the US. In New Delhi recently to discuss how the Indian government, along with civil society, can accelerate and strengthen the tobacco control movement in India, he spoke to Yamini Lohia :

How serious is tobacco addiction amongst Indian youth?

Tobacco use in India is pervasive, with over 50 per cent of adult males using tobacco. Indian youth see tobacco use as inevitable given the large number of adult role models who use tobacco. Unless we change the number of adults who use tobacco, whether it is men smoking tobacco or women chewing tobacco, tobacco use is going to be an epidemic amongst youths in India for decades to come. We have to change both simultaneously. The problem with tobacco use isn’t that youth are too immature to decide whether or not to use it. It is that tobacco use is a social norm in India and young people model their parents, encouraged by images promoted by the tobacco industry through indirect and surrogate advertising and heavy promotion at the retail outlet.

India has taken an important step in eliminating direct advertising but the tobacco industry continues to have heavy promotional imagery at the retail outlets. Walking down a street in India, you can’t go past a kiosk without seeing tobacco prominently displayed at a level that’s inconsistent with the goal of discouraging tobacco use.

What specific policy interventions does the government need to make to discourage tobacco use?

There’s a lot more that India needs to do, beginning with enforcing the new law against smoking in bars, restaurants and other locations, so that we send a different social message. Second, India took a good step forward in changing its warnings on cigarettes, beedis and other tobacco products. But it needs to dramatically increase the strength of those warnings if they’re going to be effective. It’s particularly important that graphic warnings be used in India, where such a heavy percentage of the population who use beedis and oral tobacco products can’t read.

Beedi workers are cited as the reason why anti-tobacco legislation doesn’t make headway in the country.

First, with close to a million Indians a year dying from tobacco use, most of them from using beedis, it shouldn’t be a choice between protecting the health of citizens and preserving jobs. Indeed it’s not a choice. India ought to commit itself to reducing tobacco use among all Indians and at the same time helping those who work in the beedi industry to find an alternate means of livelihood. The quickest way to reduce tobacco use would be to increase the tax on those products and then to use those funds to assist the millions of beedi workers who want to get out of beedi rolling, and help them find alternative livelihoods

5 October 2009 Indiatimes

On Monday, the Tobacco Retailers’ Alliance were not best pleased that their conference stand in Brighton had been placed beneath a sign saying The Killers.

It was advertising a forthcoming show by an indie band and was clearly, the group believed, not a deliberate attempt to undermine their campaign against tobacco smuggling and tougher restrictions on the display of cigarettes in corner shops.

But still, pointed out one of the Alliance representatives on the stand, “it is not very helpful”.

Now – less than 24 hours later – The Killers sign has been replaced by the conference organisers with a Labour Party banner.

No one on the Tobacco Retailers stand wanted to talk about why the sign had been changed or even if they had asked the organisers to do something about it.

But they seemed a little happier than they were on Monday. All very strange.

They will no doubt be hoping that Labour takes a similar line when MPs vote next month on whether to force retailers to keep cigarettes hidden from view beneath shop counters to discourage teenagers from taking up the habit.

Although given the government’s long track record of tobacco control, they shouldn’t hold their breath.

ISLAMABAD: The country’s tobacco lobby may force the government to delay its decision over cigarette packs carrying pictorial health warnings, sources in the Health Ministry said on Sunday.

On World No Tobacco Day on May 31, the government had announced the introduction of pictorial health warnings on cigarette packs and had given the industry a six-month deadline to print them from January 1, 2010. However, soon after the announcement, the tobacco industry held a number of meetings with senior Health Ministry officials to attempt to reverse or delay the implementation of pictorial warnings. The ministry had started work on legislation for introduction of warnings on cigarette packs in consultation with the Ministry of Law, but the tobacco lobby is busy trying to delay the process.

Examples: The industry contended that it could not print the warnings within six months and quoted examples of Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Romania and India, which took more than two years to publish the pictorial warnings on cigarette packs. The picture-based health warnings are particularly significant for countries like Pakistan with poor literacy rate and inadequacy of resources for public health education, and where majority of the people cannot read warnings and remain oblivious to the harmful effects of tobacco use. By introducing pictorial warnings, Pakistan would join 30 countries having similar warnings. Pakistan is signatory to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which binds more than 160 countries to use large, clear, visible and legible warnings on packs and outer packaging

The health ministry is developing a new set of pictorial warnings for tobacco products to be put in place from next year. This move came after the ministry was flooded with complaints that the current warnings were ineffective.

Tobacco manufacturers print the pictorial warning in such a way that they don’t cover 40 per cent area of the pack as mandated in the tobacco control law.

The content of the warning is also not visible in most cases and a few products don’t print the warnings at all, said B. K. Prasad, health ministry official incharge of tobacco control measures.

All these are serious violations of the law and concerned government agencies have been told to take action.

” We received a lot of complaints about the way warnings are being printed on tobacco packs and we have taken a serious view of it,” said Prasad, while talking on the sidelines of a the World Health Organization ( WHO) conference on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

A WHO official said warnings on cigarette packets hardly depict a pair of lungs diseased by tobacco smoke. ” It looks more like an image of a person wearing an oversized tie, minus the head,” he said.

In the case of chewing tobacco packs – which carry the picture of a scorpion – the makers are misleading people by informally projecting it as a government ” seal of quality”. Besides pictorial warnings on tobacco products and ban on smoking in public places – which are measures to cut the demand of tobacco products – the government also initiated steps to address the supply side as well, Prasad said.

Programmes have been launched to wean tobacco farmers away from growing tobacco and to offer alternative livelihood to people engaged in bidi rolling.

At present, nearly five million people are engaged in the bidi industry.

“The tobacco lobby has used tobacco farmers and bidi workers – to stall many steps to curb the menace in the country,” minister of state for health Dinesh Trivedi at the conference.

“Overcoming pressure from this lobby is a big challenge for tobacco control in India.”


Courtesy: Mail Today