Plain Packaging: A Resounding Failure?

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Although touted as an effective tool for lowering smoking rates, plain packaging appears to be a dud that achieves almost nothing.

By Thomas Schmid

It is not so uncommon that the realities on the ground do not always reflect what lawmakers claim could be achieved if one or another tobacco control measure. That also seems to be the case with plain cigarette packaging, still touted by authorities and anti-tobacco circles alike as an excellent tool for lowering national smoking levels and even dissuading consumers from picking up the habit in the first place.

Take Thailand, for example. Following a string of largely ineffective legislations, such as smoking bans at all sorts of outdoor locations including designated beaches, the country introduced plain packaging for all cigarette brands in October 2019, promising marvelous benefits for the general public. Unsurprisingly, so far it did not have the anticipated effect.  

Smokers will smoke regardless

“I am selling just as many cigarettes as I did previously. Smokers will smoke no matter how their cigarettes are packaged,” asserted Chalor Chingmuang, an elderly shopkeeper in Thailand’s capital, Bangkok. Her comment is of course completely in line with what critics of plain packaging have stated all along, namely that it would achieve almost nothing. Plain packaging laws, so they argue, are not much more than an official concession to placate the influential anti-tobacco lobby, but in practice lack any substantial merit.

But while consistently painting tobacco as a universal demon, governments largely keep ignoring a whole phalanx of other products that – just like tobacco – greatly impact public health statistics. Yet there is not one single law in force anywhere on the globe that would mandate plain packaging for any of them.

Imagine a situation where all such products – ranging from sugary sodas to wines, beers, or spirits and heavily processed foods containing trans-fats, preservatives, and other chemical additives - must be retailed in uniform containers bearing labels with huge health warnings and almost invisible brand names in tiny, uniform font. Inconceivable? Yet this is exactly what is happening in an increasing number of countries to tobacco products. The next states to join the plain packaging nonsense this year will be Canada, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovenia, and Turkey. Belgium is in line for 2021; and Georgia and Hungary will follow in 2022.

A matter of bothersome inconvenience

As much as plain cigarette packaging has apparently failed to lower smoking rates in any meaningful way, it has excelled in fostering inconvenience for retailers and their customers.

“Because all packaging now looks similar, it has become problematic to pick the correct brand,” shopkeeper Chalor said. “Sometimes I even have to invite customers behind the counter so they can select the product they want, as my eyes are giving out reading the tiny brand names,” the 69-year-old complained. She also suggested that “younger people who want to take up the habit for one reason or another will not be discouraged by unattractive packaging.”

It is rather ironic that the comments of a streetwise elderly woman running a small neighborhood shop in an obscure Bangkok suburb would make more sense than the unconvincing statements issued by government bureaucrats why plain tobacco packaging constituted was such a wonderful idea.

Cautious and tight-lipped

But there also is the question of brand damage. Brand owners more often than not have invested years (if not decades) and substantial amounts in carefully creating and curating a product range and associated brand image. Plain packaging, with its mandated standardized font requirements, unfairly destroys that image to a point where it becomes almost impossible to restore even if the restrictive measure should suddenly be rescinded.

Welcome support in a difficult situation

Nevertheless, the tobacco industry has support as far as opposition to plain packaging is concerned, and it comes from a wholly unexpected side: the UK-based Consumer Packaging Manufacturers Alliance (CPMA). Founded in 2013 by its current director, Mike Ridgway, “to act as a voice for the packaging industry in a world of increasing regulation and to support brand owners in all consumer market sectors,” CPMA has members across seven countries, including companies supplying the tobacco product industry. A staunch opponent of plain packaging himself, Ridgway insisted there existed not one single serious study proving the measure’s effectiveness.

“All such ‘studies’ that I have seen are by anti-tobacco advocates and universities’ so-called research departments quoting questionable sources,” he said. But all real-life evidence that plain packaging actually helped reduce smoking was actually to the contrary, he asserted. “Look at the results [concerning plain packaging] seen in Australia, and in particular a relevant study conducted by RMIT University of Melbourne,” Ridgway said. The independent study, published in 2018 on the occasion of Australia’s five-year anniversary of the introduction of plain packaging, bluntly described the legislation as “five years of failure”, revealing that the number of smokers in the country had actually increased for the first time since the successful public anti-smoking campaigns of a generation ago. 

Plain packaging encourages illicit trade

Plain packaging, Ridgway elaborated, failed in achieving its supposed purpose because consumers, if they are dedicated smokers, purchase a legal product with the knowledge that its packaging – although it may be graphically “plain” – primarily served as a production for the cigarettes while at the same time still providing certain information (e.g. nicotine and tar levels). But he also said that plain packaging laws had unquestionably contributed to a proliferation of counterfeits in the market, as evident in Australia, for instance, the first country to have mandated plain packaging in 2012. And in Canada, which is scheduled to launch plain packaging this year, proposals included the replacement of the flip-top pack by the old “shell and slide” style.

“But this type of packaging has often been used by the illegal trade, as it is much easier to copy and replicate,” Ridgway cautioned. “The increases in counterfeit tobacco products are a consequence of plain packaging,” he insisted. Instead of burdening manufacturers, retailers, and consumers with the unfair, confusing, and bothersome practice that plain packaging has come to represent, Ridgway suggested that a much more effective approach in bringing down smoking levels would be education. “Starting in schools to children of an early age, such education would promote a healthy living culture and [could be tied in with] a program explaining the unhealthy consequences of smoking,” Ridgway said. He added that “Germany is carrying this out very effectively, and statistics support this policy.”

More to come?

Yet Germany is still a member state of the European Union and, thus, subject to the increasingly stringent Tobacco Products Directive (TPD). While the second instalment of that directive, the so-called “TPD2”, came into force early last year and imposed a mind-boggling array of rather restrictive regulations on tobacco products and their manufacturers, Ridgway expected that this will only get worse in the next installment, TPD3. “TPD3 will attempt to move further along the track [of restrictions and regulations] depending on the outcome of the World Health Organization’s COP9, which will be held in the Netherlands later in 2020,” he projected.

But why is the tobacco industry presently singled out and practically demonized? “It’s because the industry is an easy target for anti-tobacco advocates,” Ridgway explained, “but also because governments have succeeded in impregnating the minds of the general public, particularly non-smokers, that [tobacco] is an unhealthy product.” Of course, few (not even the majority of actual tobacco consumers) would contest that notion.

Nevertheless, tobacco is not the only culprit. There are countless other unhealthy products around, which, however, have so far escaped the wrathful eyes of activists and overzealous bureaucrats. But perhaps not for much longer: “NGOs and control advocates are now increasingly also targeting other products including breakfast cereals and baby formulas in addition to sugar-related items, and of course also alcohol where UK politicians are demanding ‘tobacco style labeling’,” Ridgway pointed out. “But it’s still ‘new business’ for them,” he added, insinuating they still lacked the expertise how to “tackle” these product groups full force.

Is there no other way?

Until then, the crusade will continue to primarily onslaught the tobacco industry, potentially bringing it to its knees step by step. The unsavory fruits of that relentless assault can already be observed in the UK, according to Ridgway. “The introduction of plain packaging in the UK [in 2017] has eliminated the domestic tobacco manufacturing industry altogether. Nothing more is produced [there] and everything is imported,” he explained. “Consequently, no more tobacco packaging is made locally, as three large and technically highly competent packaging factories were forced to close down completely, with labor force reductions at the remaining facilities. In other words, the introduction of plain packaging had a major adverse effect on the packaging industry,” Ridgway elaborated.

We have come full circle back to the beginning of this article: “Smokers will smoke no matter how their cigarettes are packaged,” we quoted the elderly Bangkok shopkeeper as saying. Hence, plain packaging is not a real solution. So, what could be done instead to lower smoking levels? As far as the UK is concerned, Ridgway recommended that authorities “review the evidence regarding the effectiveness of plain packaging and also consider governmental revenue losses as a result of the increasing illicit trade, which in the UK is now running at GBP2.8 billion per annum, or around GBP8 million a day, according to HMRC figures.” If that happened, it also could throw a lifeline not only at tobacco businesses and associated industries, including marketing and engineering services using highly skilled employees.

However, so far there is no end in sight to the onslaught. Ridgway claimed there already were “plans being muted [in the UK] for health warnings on individual sticks.” While he went on to state that regulation still had a long way to go on from the initial introduction of plain packaging, “the CPMA also argues that plain packaging of consumer products curtails an area of brand designs and development, that it reduces the role of specialist companies [such as packaging manufacturers], and, furthermore restricts consumer choice at a time when brands need to be protected in an environment of globalized trading.”