The Australian federal government will shortly introduce legislation to require cigarettes to be sold in plain brown packages bearing a graphic health warning and, in small type, the brand:



The Opposition, a traditional recipient of tobacco company donations, has reluctantly agreed to support the bill but Big Tobacco has mounted a mammoth lobbying campaign, both directly and through foreign governments and the World Trade Organization to try and block the move.

Local campaigning efforts have included claiming that plain packaging will increase smoking, not reduce it, because it will make it easier for counterfeit producers to copy the packs and flood the market with cheap cigarettes, alternatively, with the appeal of distinctive packaging disappearing, legitimate marketer will have no competitive choice but to resort to a price war, or both of the above. As the price goes down more cigarettes will be sold.

Australia is the first country to institute plain packaging and if the move gets up here, as it almost certainly will, it is likely that other nations will follow suit.

The US Food and Drug Administration announced yesterday that, while it is not going as far, it will require grim warning labels on all cigarette packets from September 2012:



It's getting on for a century since British health care workers first wondered if there was a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. By the mid-1950s there was some firm evidence for a link. This in itself would not justify banning the product. After all, motor vehicles are a significant cause of death and we do not consider banning them on that ground. But by 30 years ago researchers were able to claim that:

Evidence that the various common types of cancer are largely avoidable diseases is reviewed. Life-style and other environmental factors are divided into a dozen categories, and for each category the evidence relating those particular factors to cancer onset rates is summarized. Where possible, an estimate is made of the percentage of current U.S. cancer mortality that might have been caused or avoided by that category of factors. These estimates are based chiefly on evidence from epidemiology, as the available evidence from animal and other laboratory studies cannot provide reliable human risk assessments. By far the largest reliably known percentage is the 30% of current U.S. cancer deaths that are due to tobacco, although it is possible that some nutritional factor(s) may eventually be found to be of comparable importance. The percentage of U.S. cancer deaths that are due to tobacco is still increasing, and must be expected to continue to increase for some years yet due to the delayed effects of the adoption of cigarettes in earlier decades. [...]

The toll from tobacco was clearly serious enough to justify robust countermeasures. They have been slow in coming, but coming they are.