Tobacco firm putting notes in packets

By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter

Many smokers will have to fight through a new layer of health warnings - printed voluntarily by a tobacco company - to get to their cigarettes.

Philip Morris, whose brands include Marlboro, yesterday started distributing packets of cigarettes with the inserts. Packets of 20 cigarettes are first up and other sizes will follow.

The inserts repeat messages already legally required on the packets themselves, that smoking is addictive and causes fatal diseases such as lung cancer.

Eventually they would be fitted in the lids of one in 12 packets, said Philip Morris communications manager Colin Lippiatt.

They would not be put in all packets because smokers were more likely to read them if faced with random notes rather than getting one in every packet.

The company started using the inserts overseas last June, in Switzerland.

But the inserts have received a cool reception from the Health Ministry and hostile one from anti-smoking group Ash (Action on Smoking and Health).

"I don't support this sort of voluntary halfway measure," said Ash director Becky Freeman.

"They are just a public relations exercise to attempt to fool the public into believing that they [Philip Morris] care about their wellbeing.

"But they don't - if they were concerned at all they would shut down," he said.

Smoking is the leading cause of preventable deaths in New Zealand, being responsible for about 15 per cent of deaths.

Nearly a quarter of adults smoke.

Ms Freeman said the leaflets were a bid to avoid having to feature graphic pictures, in cigarette packet warnings, of diseased lungs and other effects of smoking.

Such pictorial warnings were proven to reduce smoking, she said.

They, and putting the Quitline phone number on cigarette packets, were what Philip Morris should be doing to help.

Mr Lippiatt denied the company was trying to avoid putting the pictures on packets.

"We've made it clear we support the fact that consumers should get clear and consistent messages about the health effects of smoking."

The ministry's manager of public health programmes, Graeme Gillespie, said that while any efforts to reduce the harm of smoking were welcome, the warnings on inserts were unlikely to have much impact.

Research for the ministry published last month found that most smokers would discard them after little more than a glance.

Mr Lippiatt said he was not sure whether Philip Morris had considered putting the Quitline number on packets.

The company - which holds less than a tenth of the market here - made and packed most of its products in Australia and they carried an Australian smoking information line number.

Mr Gillespie said New Zealand-packaged cigarettes carried the Quitline number.

Its absence from Philip Morris products "is an issue we are working on".

He also said a public discussion document on the pictorial warnings was expected to be out in August.