New purulent warnings
The government of India intends to restrict the practice of selling cigarettes per stick, which accounts for 70 percent of cigarette consumption.
India’s Supreme Court yesterday declined to stay the central Government’s new tobacco-packaging rules that require an increase in the size of pictorial health warnings from 40 percent to 85 percent from September 1, according to a story by Bhadra Sinha for the Hindustan Times.
The Cigarettes and other Tobacco Products (Packaging and Labelling) Second Amendment Rules, 2018, require the rotation of graphics and the replacement of current images. The image of a person’s throat with a hole in it, for instance, is to be replaced with more “gruesome pictures of a person’s lips with diseased and purulent growth”.
And in line with this change, the written warning, ‘Smoking causes throat cancer’ is to be replaced with ‘Smoking causes painful death’ and Tobacco causes cancer’, in white upper-case letters against a red background.
The rules require also that packs carry a quit number through which tobacco-product users can connect with online assistance.
