Category: Packaging

  • Plainly not working

    Plainly not working

    Five years after Australia introduced standardized packaging on all tobacco products, data show that the policy has had no impact on reducing smoking across the country, according to a press note issued by Imperial Tobacco Canada through PRNewswire.

    While the Australian government had admitted earlier this year that smoking rates had not declined since the introduction of standardized packaging – the first time the rates had not decreased in more than two decades – neither its Department of Health nor Canada’s normally-vocal anti-tobacco lobby had made any statements in response to the five-year milestone, the note said.

    “We are not surprised that the data clearly indicates that implementing plain packaging has not worked in Australia,” Eric Gagnon, head of external and corporate affairs for Imperial Tobacco, was quoted as saying. “It’s time Canada recognized that efforts to legislate plain packaging will result in similar numbers.”

    France, Imperial Tobacco said, had discovered the same. Tobacco sales had not decreased in the year since the country had introduced standardized packaging, and last week the country’s health minister, Agnès Buzyn, had stated in the legislature that “plain packaging has therefore not reduced official tobacco sales”.

    “The answer to reducing the number of smokers is not, and has never been, plain packaging,” said Gagnon. “Plain packaging however does impact the sale of contraband tobacco products. Australia’s introduction of the legislation corresponded with a significant increase in the market share of illegal tobacco in the country, rising over 25 percent in the first two years [according to the KPMG report, Illicit tobacco in Australia 2016, https://home.kpmg.com/uk/en/home/insights/2017/04/illicit-tobacco-in-australia-2016.html].

    “Plain packaging forces legal companies to abandon their symbols of legitimacy and makes it easier to counterfeit tobacco products. Canada must take a step back and look at the data. It’s the reasonable thing to do.”

    Imperial said that as Canada’s Bill S-5, which mandates standardized packaging, moved to its second reading in the House of Commons, it wanted to remind legislators of the inefficiency of such packaging in other countries.

    The company said that it supported the objective set forth by Health Canada to reduce the smoking rate to five percent by 2035, but believed the best way of achieving that goal was by offering consumers less-harmful alternatives.

    “There is sound evidence telling us that vaping products are less-risky than traditional cigarettes, but they are currently illegal” said Gagnon. “Our government needs to embrace the harm-reduction model supported by other governments and public health experts, and provide Canadians with access to legal regulated vaping products as soon as possible.”

  • It’s all very tortured

    It’s all very tortured

    Sinclair Davidson, a professor of economics in Australia, is due to tell the attendees at a dinner in Brussels on Thursday how it is possible to manipulate data to justify public policy.

    The dinner is being hosted by the European smokers’ group Forest EU and the title of Davidson’s talk will be: ‘How to torture data to justify public policy’.

    The event is due to address a number of questions including:

    • How do public health groups cheat, change the rules of the game and move the goalposts without getting caught?
    • Are public health organizations in the process of being disrupted?
    • Five years on since it was introduced in Australia, has the mandatory standardized packaging of tobacco been a success or a failure?

    Davidson is professor of institutional economics, finance and marketing at RMIT [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] University. He is also a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs and academic fellow at the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance.

    Speaking ahead of the event, Davidson said that government had lost its way. “Since abandoning its role as an impartial player in society it has taken to abusing the trust civil society invests in government,” he said. “The corresponding abuse of evidence based policy should alarm everyone with an interest in good policy.”

    Meanwhile, Guillaume Périgois, spokesman for Forest EU, said too many regulations designed to advance public health were based not on undisputed evidence but on flawed data and wishful thinking.

    “The danger is that inaccurate or cherry-picked data will be used to justify more nanny state policies, from higher taxation to alarmist warnings and further restrictions on lifestyle choices,” he said.

    “Anyone who cares about scientific probity and good governance should be concerned by the questionable data that is often peddled by lobby groups and government officials.

    “It’s time to question and hold to account the public health industry and the flawed and tortured information it frequently disseminates.”

  • Marking five-year failure

    Marking five-year failure

    The UK smokers’ group, Forest, is calling for an independent review of the impact of standardized tobacco packaging.

    The call comes after what Forest says have been five years of failure following the imposition of standardized tobacco packaging in Australia.

    Commenting on today’s fifth anniversary of the introduction of standardised packs in Australia, Forest’s director, Simon Clark, said standardized packaging had been a “spectacular” failure in Australia.

    “We were told it would deter people from smoking but the effect has been minimal,” he said.

    “Data shows plain packaging has had no impact on the prevalence of smoking in Australia, which is the same now as it was in 2013.

    “In fact, because of population growth, more people are smoking in Australia than five years ago.”

    Clark said that smokers didn’t care about packaging. “It’s the product not the pack that matters,” he said.

    “Plain packaging is no deterrent to teenagers either. Few people ever started smoking because they were attracted to the pack.”

    The UK government followed Australia’s lead and introduced standardized packaging in 2016.

    And now Clark is urging the UK government to commission an independent review of the impact of standardized packaging as part of its new tobacco control plan that was announced in July.

    “Policies,” he said, “should be evidence-based. Plain packaging is based not on evidence but on wishful thinking.

    “The measure has failed in Australia and it will fail in the UK.”

  • Plain packaging not working

    Plain packaging not working

    Fifty-nine percent of Australians believe that standardized tobacco packaging has been ineffective, according to a CanvasU poll commissioned by Japan Tobacco International.

    JTI said the recent poll had been conducted to provide understanding about Australians’ views on the country’s standardized-tobacco-packaging policy, five years after its implementation.

    The research found that while 59 percent of Australians believe that standardized packaging has been ineffective, 80 percent of them believe the government wouldn’t change or would be reluctant to change a preferred policy even if the evidence were weighted against it.

    According to a note posted on JTI’s website, even the Australian government’s data justified such public scepticism. The most recent figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare showed that ‘…while smoking rates have been on a long-term downward trend, for the first time in over two decades, the daily smoking rate did not significantly decline over the most recent three-year period (2013 to 2016)’.

    “Unsurprisingly, early data from France and the United Kingdom is pointing in the same direction”, Michiel Reerink, JTI’s global regulatory strategy vice president, was quoted as saying.

    JTI said that, according to a new report published by Europe Economics, the implementation of the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD2) and the introduction of standardized packaging requirements in the UK and France, had not had any impact on smoking rates or tobacco sales.

    Recent data published by the French public authorities confirmed that, after nine months, the level of tobacco-product distribution to retailers had remained stable.

    ‘Around the world, anti-tobacco activists and some health authorities are calling for similar experimental policies to be rolled-out on other product categories such as alcohol, sugary drinks and fast food, JTI said. ‘In December 2016, Public Health England published a report calling for plain packaging on alcohol, a topic which has been raised again this month by medical journal The Lancet. In Canada, the Ontario Medical Association has mocked up images of plain packaging on food and drink products.’

    JTI added that it was therefore no surprise that CanvasU’s research had found that at least half of Australians thought it was likely that standardized packaging would be introduced on alcohol and food & drink with a high sugar content in the future; or that it was already in place.

    In fact, a majority of Australians expected this policy to be just the start of an escalation in lifestyle regulation in the future.

    “An increasing number of regulators are looking at extreme tobacco-style regulations on other product categories without considering proper evidence or research into the consequences,” said Reerink. “Brand owners should be worried about this domino-effect as policy-makers won’t stop with tobacco.”

  • Prices thrown into pot

    Prices thrown into pot

    If the price of legal marijuana must be competitive with black market marijuana to discourage underground sales, then the same logic should apply to nicotine products, according to a ctvnews.ca story quoting the head of Imperial Tobacco Canada.

    Governments across Canada are preparing for marijuana’s legalization in 2018 and are creating legislative frameworks to regulate the industry. Bill Blair, the federal MP tasked with leading the drug’s legalization in Canada, has said the provinces generally agree that the price of legal marijuana should be roughly the same or lower than that of the marijuana that can be found on the street.

    And Imperial’s Jorge Araya said that same rationale should apply to nicotine products.

    Imperial wasn’t lobbying for lower taxes for traditional cigarettes but was against future increases as well as the federal government’s plan to require standardized packaging, he said.

    Araya is lobbying also for a competitive tax regime for what he calls “less-risky” nicotine products, such as heat-not-burn products and electronic cigarettes, which, he says, represent the future of the industry.

    “The first step is to stop tax increases provincially and federally because we are getting to a level where illegal tobacco is booming in the country,” Araya said in an interview after a speech organized by Quebec’s main employers’ association.

    About 70 percent of the price of a pack of cigarettes was taxes, he said, and the illegal market in Canada represented 25 percent of sales and billions a year in lost revenue for governments.

    “We will always advocate for very high taxation with (traditional) cigarettes,” he said. “We have to pay for the externalities and health impacts that we create – what we don’t want is to go higher than we are today,” he said.

    Imperial Tobacco supports Bill S-5, which is making its way through the Senate and would legalize nicotine-containing vaping products in the country.

    But Araya said the company was against the provision forcing companies to have standardized packaging for cigarettes because that would hinder the consumer’s ability to differentiate between products and with the black market.

    Sindy Souffront, spokesperson for Health Canada, said in an email that vaping products, including e-cigarettes and e-liquids that contain nicotine, currently required authorization from Health Canada before they could be imported, advertised or sold in Canada.

    “To date, no such products have been approved,” she said. “Under Bill S-5, manufacturers and importers of a vaping product containing nicotine would not be required to seek Health Canada approval, provided that the product does not make therapeutic health claims.”

    Araya said that Imperial wanted to discuss nicotine products with the government and reach an agreement on how to treat taxation in a “very sustainable way”.

    Meanwhile, a Quebec anti-tobacco coalition said it was misleading to treat tobacco like marijuana because tobacco, unlike pot, was tied to tens of thousands of deaths a year.

    Flory Doucas, the group’s spokesperson, said “the goal of (Araya’s) speech was to rally the business community to the defence and interests of cigarette companies by stoking fear regarding new anti-tobacco measures and to publicize their new products.”

    While Imperial Tobacco is lobbying the government on regulation, it is also waiting for a major court ruling that could force the company to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to smokers.

    In 2015, a Quebec judge ordered three major cigarette companies, including Imperial Tobacco, to pay $15 billion to smokers as part of a class-action lawsuit.

    The companies made arguments to the Quebec Court of Appeal about a year ago and are awaiting a decision.

    Araya said his company isn’t ruling out going to the Supreme Court of Canada if it lost the appeal.

    “Yeah, that’s one of the avenues, to go to the Supreme Court,” he said. “But at the moment that would be speculation. We are very confident about the strength of our arguments.”

  • Uruguay going after packs

    Uruguay going after packs

    The International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (IUATLD) has commended the Uruguayan government for introducing a bill to require all cigarettes to be sold in standardized packaging, according to a IUATLD statement relayed by the TMA.

    The standardized packs will be devoid of logos, colors, brand images and promotional information, while the brand and product names will be displayed in a standard color and font.

    Current regulations require that graphic health warnings cover 80 percent of the front and back surfaces of cigarette packs.

    The statement said that, if the bill is approved, Uruguay would become the seventh nation to require standardized cigarette packaging after Australia, France, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway and the UK. José Luis Castro, executive director of the IUATLD, said Uruguay had become a world leader in tobacco control.

    He said the new policy would take the country a step closer to neutralizing the power of tobacco brands and prioritising the health of citizens above the interests of the tobacco industry.

    The IUATLD believes that standardized packaging is a powerful public health measure proven to help smokers quit and discourage non-smokers from beginning the habit.

    Castro said the bill sought to reduce the product’s appeal by removing tobacco advertisements and promotions, and thereby eliminating the possibility that consumers might be misled into believing that one product was less harmful than another.

    It sought also to increase the visibility and effectiveness of graphic health warnings.

  • Packaging challenge fails

    Packaging challenge fails

    Swedish Match has lost a court case it filed against Norway’s government over recently-imposed restrictions on the packaging of snus, according to a Reuters story.

    The company had asked for a temporary injunction against regulations that the government imposed to standardize tobacco-product packaging.

    The government argued that the new rules on packaging had been drawn up in the interests of public health.

  • Smoking rate down, but high

    Smoking rate down, but high

    The smoking rate among South Korean men aged 19 and older has fallen in recent years, but the rate remains high, according to a story in The Korea Herald.

    Citing data from Statistics Korea, the Herald reported that the smoking rate among this group was 39.1 percent in 2016, down from 43.3 percent in 2014. There was no data on the smoking rate in 2015.

    Separate data compiled by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development put the smoking rate of South Korean men aged 15 and older at 31 percent in 2015, the highest among the 15 OECD countries surveyed.

    Japan came in second with 30 percent, followed by Italy with 25 percent.

    In 2015, South Korea increased the price of cigarettes by 80 percent, from 2,500 won ($2.25) per pack to 4,500 won.

    And the South Korean government in 2016 brought in a requirement that tobacco companies included graphic warnings on the upper part of cigarette packs.

  • Apple CEO visits Iggesund

    Apple CEO visits Iggesund

    Apple CEO Tim Cook was in Iggesund, Sweden, yesterday to visit both the forest and the paperboard mill with the stated intention of learning more about the sustainability work of Iggesund Paperboard and its parent company, the Holmen Group.

    Since 2005, Apple has been a major customer of Iggesund Paperboard, buying its Invercote paperboard, which is made at the Iggesund Mill.

    “We are proud and pleased to have Apple as a customer, not least because they place very high demands on their suppliers’ sustainability work,” said Arvid Sundblad, vice president sales and marketing at Iggesund Paperboard.

    ‘Iggesund Paperboard strives to inspire next-century packaging with sustainable paperboard products, services and advice that enhance the value of world-class brands,’ the company said in a statement issued today.

    ‘The market-leading Invercote® and Incada® brands are used by some of the world’s most demanding brand owners.

    ‘Outstanding characteristics include superior durability, excellent color reproduction, whiteness that does not fade, taint and odor neutrality and design versatility.

    ‘Established in 1685 and part of the Holmen forest industry group, the company relies on its own sustainably-managed forests to ensure a renewable material for centuries to come.’

  • Taiwan to ban e-cigs

    Taiwan to ban e-cigs

    A draft amendment to the Tobacco Hazards Prevention Act, which Taiwan’s Executive Yuan is due to approve and submit to the legislature on Thursday, is set to ban the manufacture, import, sale and advertising of electronic cigarettes, according to a story in the Taipei Times.

    Under the amendment, the manufacture and importation of e-cigarettes would be punishable with a fine of between NT$50,000 and NT$250,000, while the sale of e-cigarettes and their use in non-smoking areas would be punishable with a fine of between NT$10,000 and NT$50,000.

    E-cigarettes are currently banned through an order issued by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, but the ban is not codified in the act, leaving legal wiggle room.

    “It is estimated that between 60,000 and 70,000 junior and senior-high school students in Taiwan have used e-cigarettes,” said cabinet deputy spokeswoman Chang Hsiu-chen. “Teenagers who have used them are six times more likely to smoke regular cigarettes, so the government must ban e-cigarettes to protect teenagers’ health.”

    Chang said too that because e-cigarettes contained nicotine, they were addictive. The World Health Organization had advised their regulation.

    “The possession and use of e-cigarettes is legal, but should be regulated as regular cigarettes, meaning that people under 18 and pregnant women are prohibited from using e-cigarettes, and it is illegal to use them in non-smoking areas,” Chang said.

    Meanwhile, the amendment is due also to ban flavored cigarettes and to require cigarette producers to increase the size of graphic health warnings to 85 percent, whereas, under current regulations, the warnings take up 35 percent.

    Finally, the amendment requires the government to provide legal and medical assistance to people who sustain injuries or damage to their property after attempting to dissuade people from smoking or refusing to sell cigarettes to underage people.