Have you noticed a decaying lung on your cigarette packet yet? As of last week the Department of Health made it compulsory for smoking products sold in the UK to not only include a health warning, but for these slogans to be accompanied by a gruesome image to illustrate the point. You can see the full collectable range here.
The Guardian's Jon Henley hit the streets armed with copies of said images to get the views of smokers on this latest campaign. You can watch their reactions in the video below.
Writing in G2, Henley considers the effectiveness of the smoking ban over a year on from its implementation. Despite an impressive 98% compliance, and encouraging quitting figures since the ban, he reports "23% of men and 21% of women, or just over 9 million people, are still smoking." It is, unsurprisingly, people from deprived social backgrounds who make up a large proportion of this statistic:
Today, 17% of men and 14% of women in professional and managerial occupations smoke. In routine and manual occupations, the figures are, respectively, 31% and 28%. In the most deprived areas of England, in parts of Knowsley and Liverpool, up to 52% of people smoke. In the least deprived, in places such as Rushcliffe, south of Nottingham, and Heatherside and Eastleigh in Hampshire, as few as 12% do. Some 48% of men in the poorest social class die before reaching 70, compared to just 22% in the most affluent; smoking is generally estimated to account for at least half that terrible difference in life expectancy.
The latest report by anti-smoking charity Ash, out today, reiterates this link with deprivation but suggests the overall smoking rate could be reduced to 11% by 2015 if recently discussed options such as banning the display of cigarettes in shops, outlawing cigarette machines and covering up brand names were introduced.
On Comment is free, Peter Kellner, president of YouGov, writes that polls on his site indicate "the ban has whetted the public's appetite – and, indeed, the appetite among many smokers – for further action."
Is this the case? And how do the smokers among us feel when confronted by these graphic images as we open a packet in a cold and wet smoking area?
