Forget the Marlboro Man, and laterdays for Joe Camel – distinctive cigarette packaging will go the way of the dinosaur soon, if the Federal Government has its way.
The Health Ministry plans to impose restrictions on tobacco companies that prohibit them from packaging their products in their brand identities, forcing them to instead use generic fonts and cautionary-tale images of victims of lung cancer, gangrene, and infant death.
The ministry’s director of disease control Dr Chong Chee Keong told The Malay Mail Online‘s Boo Su-Lyn yesterday that Putrajaya was looking at imposing the new requirement soon, but conceded that the Federal Government doesn’t have a firm date in mind yet.
The move would coincide with the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) theme for World No Tobacco Day on May 31 this year, which is “Get Ready For Plain Packaging”.
Australia became the first country in the world to impose plain packaging on cigarettes in 2012, and the UK, Ireland, and France passed legislation last year to mandate the same policy beginnning this May.
The WHO in a 2014 article partly attributed plain packaging for a drop in the smoking rate among Australian youths, which went from 15.1% in 2010 to 12.8% in 2013.
“The drop in the smoking rate shows that the plain-packaging law enforced at the end of 2012 — as well as the 25 per cent tax increase Australia instituted in 2010 — works,” said the WHO.
Malaysia outlawed direct advertising for tobacco products in 2003, and in 2008, cigarette packs were required to display graphic health warnings.
The retail price of cigarettes has also steadily risen, with an increase in excise duty of 40% last November hiking up cancer sticks to around RM18.50 a pack.
