UK to display gruesome pictures on packs to discourage smokers

31 August, 2007:

Horrific pictures of diseased lungs and other graphic images will appear on all tobacco products in the United Kingdom. This is a part of the government’s campaign against smoking.

According to Alan Johnson, Health Secretary, the written warnings on cigarette packets, which were introduced in 2003, were beginning to lose their impact.

By the end of 2007, every cigarette packet must carry one of 15 stark images on the effects smoking can have on the human body. Every other tobacco product will be covered by the directive a year later.

One image shows a pair of healthy lungs next to diseased organs, with the warning: ‘Smoking causes fatal lung cancer.’

The images also include a chest cut open for heart surgery, and a large tumor on a man’s neck.

Our terrifying main illustration depicts in gruesome detail just one of the perils of the deadly weed – throat cancer.

Other chilling images include a lifeless face looking up from the slab in a morgue, and a healthy lung compared with a cancer-ravaged one.

A picture of a newborn drives home the dangers of smoking while pregnant.

There are also pictures of wrinkled hands, warning of the perils for your skin, a droopy cigarette symbolizing the risk of impotence, a needle to represent addiction, and even damaged sperm.

The pictures were selected in a public consultation from 42 images developed by the European Commission in line with the 2001 Labeling Directive.

Canada was the first country to use this approach, in 2001, and research there shows more than half of smokers now claim to smoke less, while 70%
of adults and nearly 90% of youths believe that the warnings work.

Studies in Singapore, where graphic images were introduced in 2004, found that one in four smokers felt inspired to quit, and other countries, including
Australia and Brazil, also report similar pictures on cigarette packs.

Britain will be the first member of the European Union to require such warnings.

The new warnings come just over a month before the minimum age for buying tobacco in England and Wales rises from 16 to 18.

Alan Johnson said 85% of smokers wanted to give up the habit and that warnings had helped some of them to kick the habit. Smoking is the single
biggest cause of preventable illness and premature death, he added.

Smoking-related illness are said to cost the United Kingdom’s National Health Services up to £1.8 billion a year.