Pubdate: Fri, 21 Jan 2000
Source: International Herald Tribune
Page: 1
Contact: iht@iht.com
Website: http://www.iht.com/
Copyright: International Herald Tribune 1999
Author: James Brooke, New York Times Service

CANADA'S WAR ON SMOKING GETS GRAPHIC AND REAL

MONTREAL - Taking its war on smoking to a more graphic level, the
Canadian government has proposed that cigarette packs carry color
photographs of diseased hearts and cancerous lungs and lips.

And to illustrate a link between cigarette smoking and male impotence,
the Canadian health authorities chose a photograph of a symbolically
limp cigarette. Trying to dispell the perception that smoking has sex
appeal, the waning would read: "Cigarettes may cause sexual impotence
due to decreased blood flow to the penis. This can prevent you from
having an erection."

Allan Rock, the health minister, made the announcement on what he
called "Weedless Wednesday," the national stop-smoking day, saying:
"With these hard-hitting health messages and compelling graphics we
will reach smokers directly and effectively. Tobacco is the only
product on the market that will result a premature death for one out
of every two users."

With the rate of Canadian teenage smokers having risen in the 1990s,
to about 29 percent today, Mr. Rock noted that 90 percent of habitual
smokers in Canada acquired the habit before their 18th birthday. When
reporters showed the new mock-up packs to students, several described
the packs as "gross."

The Canadian tobacco industry immediately rejectted the idea of
devoting half of the front and back panels of cigarette packs to any
of 16 photographs showing smoking-related diseases. Robert Parker,
president of the Canadian Tobacco Manufacturers' Council, said
Wednesday that in addition to raising "serious doubts as to the
legality of these proposals," it would be technically impossible to
print such packages in Canada.

"It isn't a question of obstructionism," Mr. Parker said, adding that
printing companies "have told us it is impossible to do it in Canada."

Mr. Rock said he was confident that by the end of this year his
proposals would be approved by Parliament. The laws would affect all
cigarette makers but would be felt most heavily by the top three
Canadian manufacturers, none of which are U.S. subsidiaries.

Government research had found that warnings with pictures were 60
times as likely to stop or prevent smoking as were just words.
Although California and Canada have featured photographs of cancer
patients on billboards and television, the color photographs would be
the first time that pictures of cancerous tumors would be printed on
cigarette packs, said Garfield Mahood, executive director of the
Non-Smokers'Rights Association, a Canadian health group.

"Two billion packs are sold in Canada a year - 25 to 30 times a day
those packages come out of the shirt pocket or the purse, and they sit
on the dash, on the coffee table," said Mr. Mahood, who has designed
cigarette warning campaigns here and in other English-speaking
countries. "Counting each time they come out, the packs are
responsible for 50-60 billion advertising impressions per year. This
could cut out 95 percent of those favorable advertising
impressions."

In the United States, Senator Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New
Jersey, and Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, are
preparing legislation that would require large, bold warnings like
"Cigarettes are addictive" but would not go so far as to require
photographs.

"Our current cigarette warning labels are an international
embarrassment," Mr. Lautenberg said Wednesday in a statement issued in
Washington.

In 1995, Canada's Supreme Court sided with arguments made by tobacco
industry lawyers that parts of the Tobacco Products Control Act were
unconstitutional. Now, on grounds of free speech, cigarette makers are
challenging parts of a new Tobacco Act passed in 1997, which permits
the government to require health warnings.

Current warnings on the labels, written statements like those in the
United States, are universal but voluntary.