Whether plain packaging is effective at discouraging smoking could be an important issue in the WTO plain packaging dispute. What does the evidence show? Not surprisingly, there is some disagreement.
On the "it works" side, there's this:
Australia’s landmark cigarette legislation banning logos and putting dire health warnings and graphic images of sick or dying smokers on packs seems to be working, data shows, even as tobacco companies argue business is better than ever.
The country’s Bureau of Statistics says household consumption of tobacco fell 4.9 percent during the year that ended in March and clipped a small but still noteworthy 0.1 percentage point from Australia’s gross domestic product in the first quarter of this year. Consumption of cigarettes and tobacco dropped 7.6 percent in the first quarter, Commonwealth Bank economists said in a research note.
Although the data, released last week, does not show the rate of change, it illustrates that total consumption fell, according to the statistics bureau, which warned that the figures could be subject to seasonal revisions.
“We are seeing a very encouraging trend,” said Mike Daube, professor of health policy at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. “The numbers are heading in the right direction.”
Stephen Koukoulas, managing director of the Canberra-based Market Economics, agreed that tobacco consumption seemed to have dropped in the 15 months since the packaging law, the world’s most restrictive, went into effect.
But then there's also this, from the same article:
But British American Tobacco Australia said that industry sales volumes were up, and that the decline in the rate at which smokers start had slowed.
“A year after plain packaging was introduced, industry volumes had actually grown for the first time in over a decade,” a company spokesman, Scott McIntyre, said in a news release. Tobacco industry data shows the decline in the number of people smoking “has slowed by more than half to 1.4 percent” since plain packaging was introduced, he said in a telephone interview.
It's difficult to know what to make of the tobacco industry data. What's the theory behind why sales would go up after plain packaging? Maybe because there was so much talk of cigarettes in the news that everyone started craving a smoke? Are kids attracted to the gruesome images on the new packaging?
I think we need more evidence and data here. Because if plain packaging means increased smoking, tobacco companies will start pushing for plain packaging so as to get more people smoking, and then everyone's heads will start to spin.
