Little time for TPD compliance

Germany’s Bundesrat, the legislative body that represents the country’s 16 federal states, has passed a regulation transposing the revised EU Tobacco Products Directive into national law, but the timing is such as to leave manufacturers with little time to comply with some of the directive’s provisions, according to a Deutsche Welle story relayed by the TMA.

In part, the new regulation will require cigarette manufacturers to print graphic health warnings on product packs, starting on May 20, despite pleas from the industry to delay the implementation date. It will be legal for one year to sell at retail cigarettes and tobacco produced until May 2016 without the new warnings.

Representatives of the tobacco industry had fought for an extended transition period but their request was rejected by the German parliament and government.

Lobbyists say that the introduction of the rule without much of a grace period between the passing of the regulation on March 18 and its implementation on May 20 will hurt small- and medium-sized businesses more than global corporations.

“The Bundesrat’s decision is the unfortunate final stroke in a long discussion,” Michael von Foerster, head of the German Tobacco Industry Association, was said to have told Deutsche Welle.

“Usually, a country gets a deadline by which they have to implement a law like this, and then businesses get a time period in which they adjust to the new rules.”

Von Foerster said that the cost of producing the new packaging within less than two months could prove prohibitive for some members of his association, such as a local tobacco producer in Berlin with 120 employees.

Industry giants such as Philip Morris would have less of a problem.

But such an argument fell on deaf ears. “We have been really behind on this important issue,” said Burkhard Blienert, the drug policy spokesman for the Social Democrats group in the Bundestag.

“Our goal is to prevent young people from starting to smoke.

“Smoking mustn’t be equated with freedom. It’s highly damaging to your health.”