Countering Industry Arguments Against Plain Packaging: The Nanny State is going Too Far

This page was last edited on 03 February 2020, at 15:33.

The argument that “the nanny state is going too far” is a well-established and frequently used libertarian argument to oppose tobacco control legislation, aimed at gathering public support among, as BAT’s former Corporate and Regulatory Affairs Director Michael Prideaux said, “people who wouldn’t normally take notice of what the tobacco industry say”.¹ Nanny state is a term which conveys the view that a government or its policies are overprotective or interfering unduly with personal choice.

Background

Internal tobacco industry documents show that this ‘Freedom to smoke argument’ was contrived as an industry tactic as far back as 1966 to influence public opinion and oppose regulation and has been repeatedly used by Forest.² Forest, an industry funded smokers’ rights group, has worked to shift the focus away from the health impacts of smoking to issues of personal liberty. Industry documents show that in 1978, the Public Relations group Edelman, commissioned by the RJ Reynolds tobacco company, advocated that the industry reverse the increasingly unfavourable trends in public opinion regarding the social acceptability of smoking through the use of “a systematic program for allying…industry…with public health groups that espouse the dangers of governmental encroachments in personal choices and lifestyles”.³

Plain Packaging in the UK

In the plain packaging debate in the UK, Forest has led the Hands Off Our Packs campaign, which claims that if cigarettes are to be sold in plain packaging, it is only a matter of time before plain packaging and large health warnings will be applied to other consumer products, such as fizzy drinks, fatty foods and alcohol. However, although some public health advocates are calling for increased regulation on alcohol and food, the case of tobacco is unique. Tobacco is the only product that kills 1 out of 2 of its lifelong users when used exactly as directed,⁴ the vast majority of habitual smokers start before adulthood,⁵ the product is addictive⁶ and many young smokers underestimate the difficulty of giving up.⁷⁸