Grant: Operating Grant: Population Health Intervention Research

In the past year, Canada, the USA, Australia and the United Kingdom have begun to develop and legislate new forms of cigarette packaging that entail the use of extremely graphic and confronting images on warning labels, increase the size of these labels, and limit the use of tobacco industry branding. Although the ostensible goal of these requirements is to educate smokers about the health effects of smoking, they are also an extension of the fear-based messaging that has long been integral to tobacco control campaigns. However, while ethical questions have been raised about the use of fear-based messaging in tobacco control, to date these concerns have been conspicuously absent from discussions of cigarette packaging. In this project we seek to examine the ethics and effects of new cigarette packaging requirements and proposals in Canada, the USA, Australia and the UK, especially regarding the use of fear as a persuasion tactic to facilitate behaviour change, the implicit tendency to demonize smokers/smoking such messaging entails, and the unintended consequences that may result, especially in light of the growing social gradient in smoking. Following a detailed examination of the legislation in place in each of the four countries, we will conduct ethnographic interviews with smokers on the streets to examine their response to the new packaging. Importantly, this study will move beyond the experimental laboratory studies and crosssectional surveys that have dominated research in this area to date, to examine the implications of the new packaging in the context of real-life smoking.