Plain Cigarette Packaging and Other Tobacco Issues:
A Survey of Grade Seven and Grade Nine Ontario Students
by David A. Northrup and John Pollard |
Despite an overall reduction in the number of Canadians who smoke, over the past two decades smoking has increased among fifteen to nineteen year olds. Strategies to reduce the onset of smoking by youth have recently focused on the potential effect of requiring all cigarette manufacturers to use the same plain or generic package. A consortium of researchers from the Institute for Social Research at York University, the Centre for Health Promotion at the University of Toronto, the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit at the Addiction Research Foundation and Ryerson Polytechnic University recently undertook a study of Ontario youth to examine attitudes toward plain packaging and other related issues. With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, this study formed part of a larger research project, including an American component conducted by the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Ontario-wide survey examined:
- students' perceptions of the differences in the "look" of plain and regular cigarette packages,
- the effect plain packaging would have on the likelihood that young people would start to smoke,
- students' ability to recall a health warning when placed on plain and regular packages,
- the extent to which students associate events sponsored by tobacco manufacturers as advertising for cigarettes,
- where students purchase cigarettes, and
- the effect of the 1994 price cut in cigarettes on the amount young people smoke.
A random sample of Ontario students in Grade 7 and Grade 9 were surveyed between November 1994 and January 1995. A total of 1,559 completed interviews were conducted in 71 classrooms across the province. The survey results are accurate to within 2.5 percentage points 19 times out of 20.
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| ATTITUDES TOWARD PLAIN PACKAGING AND ITS IMPACT ON YOUTH SMOKING BEHAVIOUR |
| The "image" of regular cigarette packages is definitely important to Grade 7 and Grade 9 students. Sixty-four percent of students say they like regular packages better than plain packages and the same percentage of students say "cool kids" would rather smoke cigarettes in regular packages. Plain packages are considered to be more boring than regular packages by 86 percent of students and 78 percent say plain packages are uglier than regular packages.
About one third of Grade 7 and Grade 9 students thought young people their age would be less likely to start smoking if all cigarettes were sold in plain packages.In conjunction with the finding that students found plain packages boring and thought cool kids would smoke cigarettes in regular packages rather than plain packages, this suggests that plain cigarette packaging is likely to result in a reduction in the proportion of young people who smoke. |
| HEALTH WARNINGS |
| Current health warnings on cigarette packages are very direct and are printed in stark colours. Eight health warnings are currently in use and a majority of respondents in the survey chose "Smoking can kill you" as the health warning most likely to get the attention of people their age(66 percent), most likely to make people their age think twice about their smoking (60 percent) and most likely to be taken seriously by people their age (60 percent).
After being shown a poster depicting a plain or regular cigarette package for approximately one minute, the most common feature of the package recalled by students was the health warning (83 percent of all students). Indeed, the health warning was recalled by an even higher proportion of students than recalled the cigarette manufacturer (77 percent). Having more than four out of every five students recall the warning indicates that students are very aware of the potential health risks associated with smoking. (Only six percent of the American students recalled the health warnings in a similar experiment but health warnings are much less prominent on American cigarette packages than they are on Canadian packages.) |
| EVENT MARKETING |
| Two posters shown to students depicted events sponsored by tobacco companies: Player's Racing and the du Maurier Jazz Festival. In these posters, the manufacturer's name and the product name were altered to make these words unintelligible but the images on the posters remained as they are seen in advertisements.
Over one half of the students associated the Player's Racing advertisement with cigarettes, despite that fact that the poster did not have Player's company logo or name on it, indicating Player's success in maintaining a profile for their company and their product, despite the ban on cigarette advertising. The results of the event marketing research in this study indicate that Player's has successfully circumvented the intent of the legislation. |
| CIGARETTE PRICE REDUCTION AND SALES TO MINORS |
| In February 1994 the federal government decreased taxes on cigarettes, reducing the price of a package of cigarettes by about 45 percent. Student smokers were asked if the February 1994 reduction in the price of cigarettes caused them to "smoke more, smoke less or [if it] did not make any difference" in the amount they smoked. About two thirds of the smokers said it made no difference but one third of both light and daily smokers said they smoked more as a result of the decrease in the cost of cigarettes (see Figure 1).
In the survey we asked smokers how they obtained their cigarettes. Thirty percent of the light smokers and 59 percent of the daily smokers said they "mostly buy [their cigarettes] at a store." That 59 percent of daily smokers report that they usually purchase cigarettes at a store calls for a stricter enforcement of the 1994 Tobacco Control Act, whose goals included the prevention of cigarette sales to minors. In essence, every student who reported that they purchased their cigarettes in a store represents a failure in the current system to prevent the sale of cigarettes to minors. |
| FIGURE 1
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| David A. Northrup is Manager of Survey Research at the Institute and John Pollard is a Project Manager at ISR. Their full report on "Plain Packaging of Cigarettes, Event Marketing to Advertise Smoking, and Other Tobacco Issues: A Survey of Grade Seven and Grade Nine Ontario Students" is now available from the Institute's Publication Series. |
