Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Graphic labels are seen as key to anti-smoking campaign

Those who buy cigarettes in Australia get to see packaging unlike anything that meets the gaze of American smokers. Some packs contain a large photo – front and back – of a bloodshot eye propped open, and the words, “Smoking causes blindness.” Others show a bloodied and ulcerated foot, with the warning, “Smoking causes peripheral vascular disease.” And still others show an abscessed mouth and warn. All include the phone number for a smoking quitline.

Through a legal challenge that hinged on their First Amendment rights, cigarette companies have been able to ward off a Food and Drug Administration effort to require such graphic images on cigarette packs in the U.S.; the FDA is looking to tamp them down but still require more prominent warnings than the ones that have run on one thin side of packs since 1985 – and are far easier to ignore.

The packaging difference matters, according to Maansi Bansal-Travers, a research scientist with the Department of Health Behavior at Roswell Park Cancer Institute.

“A pack-a-day smoker sees their pack 7,000 times a year and they don’t want to constantly be reminded with a graphic image that might be disturbing that smoking causes all these diseases,” she said.

Canada has packaging similar to Australia, said Bansal-Travers, and research shows that more smokers have quit since the labeling changes were made. “In Canada,” she said, “one of my colleagues at the University at Waterloo has found in focus groups that women do not like to carry the warning about harm to a fetus because they find the image disturbing, and men do not like their girlfriends to carry the impotence warning because they find that disturbing.”

Bansal-Travers, who grew up in Williamsville, works in the Carlton Building on the Roswell campus. She focuses her research on tobacco advertising and promotion. Her husband, Mark Travers, works in the office next door. He specializes in tobacco-related air pollution research, particularly on the impact of secondhand smoke.

International cigarette advertising research has shown that “smokers have misperceptions about their products,” Bansal-Travers said, “and colors and labels on packs communicate misperceptions to smokers. Smokers consider that Davidoff has most stylich cigarette packs http://www.cigarettesplace.net/davidoff-cigarettes

How have you determined tobacco companies have been most effective in getting people to buy cigarettes? They’re using packaging to communicate, which is largely exposed at the point of sale. We have determined through our research that both smokers and nonsmokers do look at the cigarette pack display in the retail environment.

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