Lung Sask. praises new warning labels on cigarettes, but says more needs to be done

According to Lung Saskatchewan, the move has been long overdue.

“It was actually the summer of 2022 when the federal government announced that they would be going in this direction,” said Jennifer May, VP of Health Promotion with the organization.

“We advocate for lung health and for the protection of public health, and so this is something that we’ve asked of the government and we’re very excited to see it come to the world.”

The wording on every cigarette, written in English and French, ranges from warnings about harming children and damaging organs to causing impotence and leukemia. One caution says smoking is “poison in every puff.”

Health Canada said Wednesday, on World No Tobacco Day, that the goal of the strategy is to reach less than five per cent of tobacco use by 2035 as part of new regulations that will also strengthen health-related graphic images displayed on tobacco packages.

The regulations will come into force on Aug. 1 and will be implemented through a phased approach.

Dozens of studies in Canada and elsewhere have supported the move to print warnings on each cigarette.

In a commentary published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2018, researcher Crawford Moodie of the Centre for Tobacco Control Research at the University of Stirling in Scotland said that despite the prominence of warnings on cigarette packages in Canada and other countries, some smokers focus on the branding instead. He said that type of “avoidant behaviour” would be more difficult with warnings on each cigarette when smokers light it and see it in an ashtray.

In 2019, Oxford Academic released the findings of a study done in the United States to show if graphic warning labels were effective in deterring people from smoking.

The experiment found that the effects of graphic health warning labels on adult smokers’ purchase of cigarettes depends on their level of nicotine dependence. Smokers lower in nicotine dependence were less likely to purchase cigarettes when graphic labels were present.

The study found, however, that repeated exposures to the same warning labels could cause them to eventually lose their effectiveness.

May said she is aware of skepticism regarding the labels and whether they will be effective in reducing tobacco use.

“I think at the end of the day, you have to ask the people who use the products and they’ve done that,” she said. “Research findings indicated that those large graphic warnings on the cigarette packages were effective in the means of increasing their health knowledge, but also providing cessation benefits.”

While Lung Saskatchewan and other groups are happy with the labels, they acknowledge the fight is not over yet. May said they continue to push for stricter rules on vaping products to reduce the number of young people using those products.

“We want to see flavours out of vaping products gone as well,” she said. “Some of the provinces are starting to move on this. we would love to see this nationally.”

Health Canada said that king-size cigarettes will be the first to feature the new warnings and will be sold in stores by the end of July 2024, followed by regular-size cigarettes and little cigars with tipping paper and tubes by the end of April 2025.

-With files from The Canadian Press

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derek.craddock@pattisonmedia.com

Twitter: @princealbertnow

by Derek Craddock

Lung Sask. praises new warning labels on cigarettes, but says more needs to be done

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