Stop me smoking: Government U-turn on Plain Packs

Earlier this week, I visited the Doctor. After going through my questions related to my ailing body (yes, I am falling to bits at the ripe old age of 22), she asked me if I was still a smoker. I answered truthfully, which is quite difficult for me as even now after 4 years of on-off smoking, I’d still not recognise myself as a ‘smelly’ smoker.  Perhaps just a casual, ‘clean’ one?

I explained that I go through prolonged periods of abstention, followed by even longer periods of non-abstention. The doctor explained that I might need some support to kick the habit (because 2 months at a time is not really being a non-smoker, though could perhaps be considered semi-smoking?). “No”, I thought to myself, “What I really need is the packets of cigarettes that I love carrying around to be covered in dead people and black lungs and under-developed babies.”

And so then to today’s news from the government, that they will be waiting for at least another year to ban branding on packets, because the Australian introduction of this law is now acting as a trial for the British government.

What a useless excuse. We are not a reactionary country, based on statistics. We are a country based on morals. As a (semi-) smoker, I’d love nothing more than to have cigarettes branded in black. I would immediately quit. Whilst we still have red stripes on packets, I will continue to pretend I am the Marlboro man.

It seems, then, that the government has given in to the lobbying and soft-power marketing being dropped into packets of cigarettes. The companies that pushed so hard to ban black branding in Australia clearly have much more power in the UK. So whilst the tax goes up on cigarettes in the UK to the 2^nd highest prices in Europe, people are still attracted to smoking.

The government is at risk of creating a taxed fashion accessory. There is a theory in luxury, that the more exclusive or expensive an item is, the more attractive it is and thus the more people consume it. And they consume it openly, in order to attract attention. This theory is known as conspicuous consumption, and with cigarettes verging on £10 a packet; this surely will become a factor. There are only so many people who will quit smoking; the others will continue. And as a luxury image develops around these cigarettes, they will smoke more openly and attract more attention and smoking will quickly become what it was in the 60s: a luxury hobby (albeit deadly).

The only way to stop this from happening, to remove the fashionable image of cigarettes, is to remove the branding itself. Until the government gets out of bed with the Tobacco companies who unethically tempt us (me included) into inhaling their products that will - essentially, kill us - prices may rise but the sexual allure of cigarettes attracting young children to smoke will remain. Today’s youth are image conscious: make something look bad and they will abandon it.

I’ll stop when branding goes black. Until then, as the British Heart Foundation put it: thousands of people are at risk.