Canada will be the first nation to start printing warnings directly onto individual cigarettes in a bid to deter young people from starting smoking and encourage others to quit.
The warnings, which will be in English and French, will include phrases like “Cigarettes cause cancer” and “Poison in every puff”.
The new regulations go into effect on Tuesday.
Starting next year, Canadians will begin to see the new warning labels.
By July 2024 manufacturers will have to ensure the warnings are on all king-size cigarettes sold, and by April 2025 all regular-size cigarettes and little cigars with tipping paper and tubes must include the warnings.
The phrases will appear by the filter, including warnings about harming children, damaging organs and causing impotence and leukaemia.
In May, Health Canada said the new regulations “will make it virtually impossible to avoid health warnings” on tobacco products.
A second set of six phrases is expected to be printed on cigarettes in 2026.
The move is part of Canada’s effort to reduce tobacco use to less than 5% by 2035 and follows a 75-day public consultation period that was launched last year.
Canada has required the printing of warning labels on cigarette packages since 1989 and in 2000 the country adopted pictorial warning requirements for tobacco product packages.
Health Canada said it plans to expand on warnings by printing additional warning labels inside the packages themselves, and introducing a new external warning messages.
Dr Robert Schwartz, of the University of Toronto, told BBC News it was good news that Canada was “moving forward with this innovation”.
“Health warnings on individual cigarettes will likely push some people who smoke to make a quit attempt and may prevent some young people from starting to smoke,” he said.
He also pointed to New Zealand, which has introduced very low nicotine cigarettes, as a leader in limiting the use of tobacco.
Mr Schwartz added: “These are the kinds of measures needed if we are serious about decreasing tobacco use.”
Tobacco use continues to kill 48,000 Canadians each year.
“Tobacco use continues to be one of Canada’s most significant public health problems, and is the country’s leading preventable cause of disease and premature death in Canada,” Public Services Minister Jean-Yves Duclos has previously said.
The Canadian Cancer Society, Canada’s Heart and Stroke Foundation and the Canadian Lung Association have all praised the warning labels, saying they hope the measures will deter people, especially young people, from taking up smoking in the first place.
Cigarette smoking is widely regarded as a risk factor for lung cancer, heart disease and stroke.
In Canada, the rate of smokers aged 15 years or older is around 10%, according to a national 2021 Tobacco and Nicotine survey but electronic cigarette use has been on the rise.
This would only create an underground market for it, and if we’ve learned anything at this point, those underground markets are impossible to regulate and often are more dangerous and risky to the user.
Legal sales and regulating it is usually much more effective.
Yea I’m not saying we ban cigarettes, I’m saying you can’t mass manufacture them anymore nor sell them retail. I’m not saying people can’t smoke them. What you describe as “underground” is just artisanal, which is 100% fine because the real effect it will have is reduce smoking to a fraction of what happens today.
For context in Canada there are about 1.5billion cigarettes sold per month. If you ban retail sales, and force smaller scales, you absolutely decimate that number which is much more effective then any other bullshit neo-liberal policiy you can come up with.
Underground is not artisanal, underground is cigs smuggled into Canada from the US or Mexico, and containing fillers you would never know.
Sure it would be great if banning the sale of it would work, but it would just make the problem harder to manage.
Still a black market. In my state, recreational marijuana black market skyrocketed when they decriminalized. Very, very few people started growing or prepping their own. But boy did they find for sale it whenever they wanted it.
Here in NZ the government didn’t even ban darts but the high taxes have led to a decent amount of illegal (and potentially unsafe/adulterated) Chinese/Indonesian durries being sold on the black market - got some off a mate half a decade ago that were half the price of the cheapest legal ciggies at the time, and legal ones have gone up by some $15/pack since then!