“Poison in every puff”, “Cigarettes cause cancer”… Cigarettes and little cigars sold in Canada will soon carry a warning printed on each unit, a world first.
The new regulations announced in May came into force on Tuesday, August 1. Manufacturers now have until July 2024 to bring their packaging for full-size cigarettes into compliance and until April 2025 for the rest of cigarettes and little cigars.
Located at the base of the cigarette, near the filter, these warnings “will be virtually unavoidable and serve as a stark reminder of the health consequences of smoking,” Carolyn Bennett, then-minister of addictions, said in May.
The objective is to reduce tobacco consumption, which kills around 48,000 people a year in the country, according to the authorities. The Canadian government says it has found that some young people, particularly prone to tobacco addiction, start smoking after receiving a single cigarette rather than a pack with health warnings.
Canada already a forerunner in tobacco control
In 2000, Canada was the first country to order the affixing of graphic warnings on packages, including macabre representations of diseased hearts and lungs, in order to raise awareness of the health risks associated with smoking.
Since then, smoking has been on the decline, but Ottawa wants to go further and wants to reduce the number of smokers in the country to 5% of the population, or about 2 million people, by 2035, from about 13% currently.
In December, New Zealand implemented a near-total and phased tobacco ban by introducing an annual increase in the legal smoking age.
According to a World Health Organization report released on Monday, 5.6 billion people – 71% of the world’s population – are now protected by at least one tobacco control measure, five times more than in 2007. But only four countries – Brazil, Turkey, Mauritius and the Netherlands – have adopted all of the anti-tobacco measures recommended by the WHO. 2021.