Plain tobacco packs awaken a sleeping tobacco industry

I have been following this plain-packaging news with interest, and as a non-smoker with a serious dislike of smoking would very much welcome the day when no one would ever smoke again. I’m tired of having to dodge smokers on the pavement just to avoid getting a whiff of those cigarettes in my face, or having to move when enjoying my lunch on a park bench only for someone to sit down next to me and light up, or asking the man in my block who insists on lighting up in the enclosed stairwell to stop doing it. However, the reason I am writing is that I am not impressed with, what appears to me, the unbalanced view of CRUK in the plain packaging campaign, and also the language in this particular article, which you have decided to post and thus must support. I understand where you are coming from in terms of your campaign objectives, but to describe the entire tobacco industry as a ‘sleeping dodo’ is absurd – I’d be more inclined to think that they must be pretty frantic about legislation against branded packaging. A desperate dodo, maybe, but a sleeping one? The article also quotes tobacco industry leaders as being ‘like cockroaches’, which strikes me as extreme and fanatic, as if you are trying to make out they are some type of crazed evil child molesting monster out to get its dirty hands all over the young and get them hooked. Demonising any person or party is dangerous as it can lead to the loss of perspective and thus ignorance, which is my main beef with your campaign. I am all for educating people on the risks of smoking and especially children and young people, for this seems more like bullying to me, very one-sided. Not every smoker is a helpless addict, and not every person who takes up smoking has that to look forward to as their inevitable fate – the tobacco industry caters to a wide variety of people who smoke for a variety of reasons and I guess at varying levels of responsibility. I feel the plain packaging campaign punishes those. As a non-smoker, I am also quite fed up at having to look at those horrendous health warnings with images of cancerous lungs on packs either in shops or on the street, I find them sickening and would much rather look at a beautifully designed one. I also feel you are singling out the tobacco industry – why don’t you have such campaigns against manufacturers of ready meals or fast food chains whose unhealthy foods can clog up arteries and cause all sorts of health problems including bad-diet related cancers? Why is there no campaign for them to have photos of clogged up arteries on their packaging, or a child in a video saying something about an unhealthy ready meal targeted specifically at kids along the lines of “I would love to eat this because the pack looks like a fun storybook”? An industry manipulating its consumers for profits is NOT unique to the tobacco industry, but your portrayal of them, in my opinion, singles them out as the only ones who use this principle. If cigarettes are sold below the counter and out of sight, isn’t that enough? If a child sees a nice looking pack at home, I think they are going to me more enticed to smoke themselves because others in their home are smokers, not simply because the pack looks nice or cool or posh. I doubt a plain pack would put them of in the slightest if ‘mummy still smokes a pack a day’. The video of the children did not strike me as sincere either, it looked staged. I would have been more impressed if you had a campaign that focused on educating children on the risks of smoking, which I’m sure you have in one way or another. The things the kids said in the video were very predictable, and they’ll say the same things about unhealthy food and drink packaging, so my point is: I feel you are going too far with this campaign, and that your coverage on news and opinions is not balanced and fair, and thus manipulative, the very thing you are accusing the tobacco industry of being. If the power of packaging is your concern, you should target all types of products that rely on design tricks to ‘wrap up’ the consumer, not just one particular industry. There is also a possible side-effect that kids may actually want to smoke these cigarettes now because they are seen to be ‘bad’ or ‘naughty’ out of a need to rebel or not conform. Instead of this video with the children, how about a video of parents or grandparents asking their children not to start? I remember there was a TV ad years ago where a crying child asked a parent to stop smoking; this way you could turn that around. Maybe a mother saying “Sweetheart, I know you’ve seen me smoking all my life, but there are a couple of reasons why I’d like to ask you not to take up smoking yourself…” Or a child playing with a pack asking his grandma with a picture of a cancerous lung: “Grandma, do your lungs look like this? If you know they are bad, why are you smoking them?” Or show how much money they would have to spend over the years if they were to smoke a certain amount of cigarettes a week, and what else that could have been spent on. “If you start smoking, you could be missing out on (footage of great holiday with friends), but you could be in for this (footage of a cancer patient in hospital)”. The plain packaging campaign I feel misses the point. OK, rant over, I would welcome any feedback, I guess the point of any campaign is to raise awareness and get people talking, so I’m talking, and hopefully not into a void.