Australia's Latest Assault on Cigarette Packs

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Erik Hayden 2,908 Views Apr 7, 2011

Little by little, it's getting harder for smokers to take a casual cigarette break without seeing a diseased mouth, dying person or humongous cancer warning on a pack. And that would be the point.

Worldwide, governments have been working to paint cigarette smoking in the most dire of terms. The latest initiative arrives from Australia, where the government has proposed relatively enormous pictures of a decrepit mouth and a hospitalized child prominently on cigarette packs.

The innovation on the Australian labels isn't necessarily the images themselves. By now, smokers in many countries are used to grotesque pictures sitting alongside cigarette logos and brands. The U.S. FDA unveiled its own scary pictures for cigarette packs last November. But Australia wants to take their effort one step farther by requiring all packs to have the same color "ugly olive green" color scheme an attempt to blur the lines between packs and portray and limit the brand name to a single, simple line of text over an ugly olive green field at the bottom of the box. 

For comparison, here's the proposed cigarette labels in a few other English speaking countries. 

United States:

[FDA]

Australia:

[FT/AFP]

Canada:

[CTV]

European Union - Britain:

[BBC]

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