Big bad tobacco is actually a pretty soft target

Patrick Carlyon
16 Aug

Smoking is bad. Big tobacco is evil. These truisms are as entwined as pies and sauce. Therefore, the plain packaging of cigarette packets must be a progressive step, given tobacco companies have spent tens of millions of dollars fighting the idea. Yesterday, the High Court made such legislation binding.

An industry so scary they now make funny movies about it…

Even smokers might gloat at the idea of tobacco companies being flogged in a courtroom. And Australia, once again, gets a gold medal for showing the world how it should be done, which is a step up at least from some of ourl male swimmers.

It was a “victory for all families who had lost someone to a tobacco-related disease” said a Gillard Government press release. It was “a relief for every parent”. “For anyone who has ever lost someone, this is for you.” Cigarettes, it seemed, have been reinvented.

Once, they were sort of cool. Now they’re as scary as heroin, even though cigarettes usually take decades to kill you, even though they cause almost no domestic violence, even though millions of Australians have chosen to give up cigarettes, and even though for the past generation or two anyone who claimed they were unaware of the dangers of smoking must have been a moron.

Of course smoking is a vice. Humanity digs vices. Vices link the most ancient tribes to the most glamorous subsets of the glitterati. Cigarettes are stupid. So is cocaine. And ecstasy. And the abuse of alcohol. And yet all these chemicals are in constant demand.

One TV interview you’ll never hear with a police officer goes like this: “His friends say he smoked half a pack of Benson and Hedges Smooth before he got behind the wheel of his Commodore and drove into a pole.”

Or a TV court reporter saying: “The prosecution alleges that on the night in question, the man had been chaining Alpine menthol cigarettes before forcing himself on the victim.”

Much of the reporting of yesterday’s decision was notable not for what it said, but for what it did not say. Yes, plain packaging is world first. Yes, other countries watched the High Court decision with keen interest.

But will plain packaging work in reducing smoking rates? No one knows. It hasn’t been tried before. And is it what the electorate wants? Some opinion polls suggest most Australians didn’t want it, although both major parties supported it.

But the Government’s use of such provocative language does suggest a certain willingness for easy targets. No one, after all, is going to sympathise with big tobacco. Fewer and fewer non-smokers sympathise with the “plight” of smokers any more. They’re more willing to openly condemn their stinky habit than they once were. That’s a good thing. Lower tolerance equates to less smoking, even if it may be based on misleading statistics.

Yesterday, the Government repeated the oft-quoted “social and economic annual cost” of smoking at $31.5 billion. Many people assume this figure is based on the burden smokers place on the health system. It actually includes $19.5 billion for the “psychological costs of premature death”.

But what of the other everyday vices? If the Government is genuinely determined to save lives, why are we still awash in beer and spirits TV ads? Alcohol is sensibly enjoyed by many. Yet it is also a contributing factor in about a quarter of Victorian road deaths. A recent study found that children are victims of alcohol-related harm in more than one-fifth of Australian homes. It is thought to be a risk factor in about 20,000 cases of child abuse.

Alcohol smashes families with swift and ugly swipes that steal innocence and perpetuate evils. Yet no one is suggesting it be plainly packaged, or that those TV ads be pulled, even though the damage caused by alcohol abuse is more violent and immediate than anything attributed to cigarette smoking.

What about fast food? We can’t escape commercials depicting families gathered at the dinner table tucking into fried this or that.

Yet Australians are getting fatter and fatter as our fondness for such food increases our waistlines and rates of diabetes.

Are we going to introduce taxes on unhealthy foods, then limit advertising on those foods, then ban that advertising altogether, then introduce plain packaging? Are we going to show the world how ace we are by taking on the multinational fast-food giants?

After all, one study found that obesity cost Australia $58.2 billion a year, although that number too has been questioned.

One thing is certain. Plain packaging for unhealthy foods in supermarket aisles would certainly constitute a “relief for every parent, and this would have nothing to do with the health benefits.