Canada has taken steps to curb tobacco use by requiring warning labels to be printed directly on individual cigarettes, becoming the first country in the world to do so, the Ministry of Health announced Wednesday.
The new packs will carry warnings such as “Tobacco smoke harms children”, “Poison in every puff” and “Cigarettes cause impotence”. The warnings will appear in both English and French, the health ministry said.
Warning labels designed to help smokers quit smoking
The government’s move to mandate warning labels is intended to help smokers quit, protect non-smokers and young Canadians, and reduce the appeal of tobacco use. It is also part of a federal strategy to reduce tobacco use to less than 5% by 2035.
Tobacco kills an estimated 48,000 Canadians each year, said Carolyn Bennett, the associate minister of health.
“This bold step will make health warning messages virtually unavoidable,” Bennett said, adding that, combined with updated packaging graphics, the warnings “will be a real and surprising reminder of the health consequences of smoking.” she said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The regulation enters into force in stages starting on August 1. The warnings will first appear on king-size cigarettes in July 2024 and on regular cigarettes and small tipped paper cigarettes, as well as on tubes, by the end of April 2025, the Ministry of Health said.
Canada has been at the forefront of the fight against tobacco use. According to the health ministry, the nation became the first in 2000 to require cigarette and other tobacco packages to display graphic images of the health hazards of smoking.
In the US, health warnings first appeared on cigarette packages in 1966 and were updated in 1984, but remained unchanged for decades. The Food and Drug Administration imposed new rules in 2021 that require packages to feature written statements “along with photorealistic color images that describe some of the lesser-known but serious health risks of smoking, including the impact on fetal growth, heart disease, diabetes and others,” according to the agency.
Research has found that such messages have varied effects. A 2020 study published in the journal Human Communication Research concluded that cigarette warning labels that use images increase the chances that smokers will quit, but do not necessarily influence beliefs about the health risks of smoking. An earlier 2016 meta-analysis by some of the same authors who conducted the 2020 study found that graphic images were more effective at preventing smoking or getting smokers to quit than text warnings.
