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Figure 6.1: Smoking Prevalence and Lung Cancer Incidence, by Sex, Great Britain, 1948-2010 |
The thinking behind the move is that by not having the cigarettes readily visible to the public, particularly young people under 18, it will discourage potential young smokers from taking up the unbelievably unhealthy habit. Furthermore, it is hoped that the ban will help those smokers who are trying to quit by removing the temptation from weekly shopping trips. Harrowing figures from the website say that a fifth of adults in the UK smoke - a figure which has remained steady in recent years after decades of rapid falls. At the beginning of this post I included a graph from the Cancer Research UK website showing the smoking prevalence trends in Great Britain by sex, from which we can see that while the number of adult smokers had rapidly declined since around 1974, the rate of this decline has slowed in recent years. Of course, this graph only shows adult smokers, and does not take into account the number of young people who take up smoking every year.
From the Cancer Research UK website, we can learn the following about child smokers:
"It is illegal to sell any tobacco product to under 18s in the UK. However, while less than 1% of 11 and 12-year old children smoke, by the age of 15 years, 12% of children in England report being regular smokers (usually smoke at least one cigarette per week). (23) According to these figures, the Department of Health has met its 2011 target of reducing smoking among 15-year-olds in England to 12% .(52) However, there is evidence that actual smoking rates among 15-year olds may be higher than reported, based on measurements of cotinine in saliva, with 21% of 15-year old boys and 19% of 15-year old girls having cotinine levels indicative of active smoking. (24) "
If you're interested, the titles of papers they used to obtain the figures are linked to the numbers in parentheses in the above paragraph.
In 2008, marketing professors Janet Hoek, Phillip Gendall and Jordan Louviere presented research at the Australia and New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference that found:
“tobacco brand imagery functions via respondent conditioning, where brand names, colours and other imagery become paired with psychological and emotional attributes. These peripheral cues act as heuristics (definition here) that do not require systematic processing, but are implicitly relied on by smokers to move from their actual self to their desired self.”
In a nutshell, Jean King, of charity Cancer Research UK, said the ban would help stop children who are attracted to brightly coloured tobacco packaging from taking up smoking but further action was still needed."Of course we want to see the pack branding taken away as well. This is not a normal consumer product, it kills people. We want to protect the next generation of children," she said.
However, while I have presented views that support the ban, there is controversy surrounding the murky waters of suggestive advertising, and there are opinions to the contrary. For example, Andrew Opie, from the British Retail Consortium, said it was wrong to believe the legislation would have a major effect on young people and it was supermarkets and other shops which were bearing the brunt of the costs needed to comply with the ban. He said: "Children are more likely to smoke when they're in a household where parents smoke and also they tend to get their cigarettes from either parents, or older peers, not directly from supermarkets."
My own view is that while it is people's own choice to begin smoking, any move from the government that discourages the habit, or even makes it less obvious on an everyday level, should be wholeheartedly supported. It is also my view that to some extent the tobacco companies actively target the young, which I do not agree with on a moral level. I believe we need to do whatever we can to protect vulnerable and impressionable young people from the marketing and peer-induced "glamour" or "normality" of starting smoking, to prevent the tragic health problems that it brings.
As you can tell, the news article prompted me to do some of my own research into the area; I will be interested to see if the move has an impact upon people on a personal level, and prospective trends to come.
Thank you for reading!
References:
http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/lung/smoking/lung-cancer-and-smoking-statistics
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17626133
http://theconversation.edu.au/plain-cigarette-packaging-will-change-smoking-slowly-737
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