Meehan Proposes Graphic Warning Labels to Reduce Teen Smoking
By Kelly Field
WASHINGTON, March 12–In an effort to reduce teen smoking in the Merrimac Valley and beyond, Congressman Martin T. Meehan, D-Lowell, has introduced legislation that would require tobacco companies to put large, graphic, warning labels on their packaging and advertising.
The labels, which will be modeled after prototypes created by local teenagers, could include pictures of diseased mouths, damaged hearts, cancer-ridden lungs or, to suggest impotence, limp cigarettes. Meehan called the labels “part of the answer to Big Tobacco’s spin machine.”
“Big tobacco is the master of marketing,” said Meehan, co-chairman of the Congressional Task Force on Tobacco and Health. “Health advocates need to match fire with fire.”
The warning labels, he said, are more candid and honest than current labels and would “truly hammer home what smoking does to your health and your children’s health.”
Johanna Ortolaza, a member of the Lawrence Teen Coalition, an anti-tobacco youth advocacy group, said that better warning labels would help combat teen smoking by “showing what people go through.” Ortolaza’s package design-a diseased lung superimposed over a photograph of a beautiful model-was one of only 6 chosen out of 150 submitted to the Massachusetts Tobacco Control Program for portrayal on three-foot tall mock cigarette packages that will be displayed throughout the northeast this spring. The text reads: “Smoking hurts you in ways you cannot see.”
“Pictures would be more effective at motivating people to quit smoking,” said Ortolaza, a junior at Greater Lawrence Technical High School. She said teens today smoke because of “stress from September 11,” and family problems.
“They just want to get away,” she said. “It calms them down.”
According to the North Shore Tobacco Control Program, 34 percent of Massachusetts high school students smoke, and 24,000 area residents under 18 become daily smokers each year.
Adult smoking rates in Lawrence and Lowell are at 25 per cent, or 3 percentage points higher than in the rest of Massachusetts, according to the most recent Department of Public Health Behavior Risk Factor Survey. From 1994 to 1998, 183 Lawrence residents and 366 Lowell residents were diagnosed with lung cancer, according to the department’s newest cancer registry.
Current warning labels on cigarette packages in the United States are weaker and less conspicuous than those in other countries, according to a report on reducing tobacco use issued by the surgeon general of the United States in 2000. The new labels would include pictures and occupy 50 percent of the front and rear panels of a cigarette or smokeless tobacco package or advertisement. The text might read “Children see, Children do,” “Cigarettes are a heart breaker,” “You’re not the only one smoking this cigarette” or “Each year the equivalent of a small city dies from tobacco use.”
“The current warning labels are so small, they’re easy to overlook,” said Ralph Hingson, a professor of public health at Boston University who teaches a course called “Strategies to Reduce Tobacco Use.”
“Smokers don’t pay attention to [current] warning labels,” said Dr. Michael Siegel, a former tobacco control officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and author of the book Marketing Public Health. “There is strong empirical evidence that it has no effect on smoking rates.”
There is, however, some empirical evidence that the larger, more graphic ads do. Since Canada replaced its black and white text warnings with larger picture-based warnings a year ago, more adults have quit or tried to quit smoking, a study by the Canadian Cancer Society found. According to the study, 43 percent of smokers said the ads made them more concerned about the health effects of smoking and 38 percent said the warnings were a factor in their decision to try to quit. The study also found that 17 percent of smokers had asked for a different package of cigarettes because they did not like the warning label on the first one.
“We are very encouraged by the findings,” said Ken Kyle, director of public issues for the Canadian Cancer Society. “The warnings are having an impact on a significant segment of the smoking population.”
The Canadian regulations have already inspired international action. Brazil recently implemented a law requiring picture-based warnings to cover 100 percent of the front or back of the package, and the European Union has adopted a directive giving its 15 member countries the option of using pictures. And next week in Geneva, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control of the World Health Organization will continue examining the possibility of making picture-based warnings a worldwide minimum requirement.
Each year, 10,000 Massachusetts residents die from smoking, according to the National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids. Annual statewide health care expenditures related to tobacco use are $2.4 billion.
Published in The Eagle-Tribune, in Lawrence, Mass.
