The French government announced on Thursday a plan to curb smoking that would introduce plain packaging for cigarettes, ban smoking on playgrounds and make it harder to use electronic cigarettes in certain public settings. These measures aim to cut smoking by 10 percent over the next five years in France, which has one of Europe’s highest smoking rates, especially among young people. Previous efforts by the French government to reduce tobacco consumption have stalled in recent years.
Under the government’s packaging plan, all cigarette packs in France would have the same shape, size, color and typography. They would also carry health warnings. The brand’s logo would be small, with a fixed size and positioning on the package. Australia is the only country so far to have adopted completely neutral packaging. Since 2012, cigarette packs there are dark olive-brown and logo-free, with graphic depictions of smoking’s negative health consequences. Tobacconists and cigarette producers in France reacted angrily on Thursday to the government’s plain-packaging plan, which they said would do nothing to discourage young smokers and would instead favor the contraband market.
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But the health minister, Marisol Touraine, who presented the antismoking proposals after a cabinet meeting on Thursday, said steps were needed to reduce the 73,000 smoking-related deaths every year in France. “I have chosen my side, that of public health,” she said. “This is an important moment in the fight against tobacco.” The French proposals would be more restrictive than the tobacco rules that the European Parliament passed last fall. Those rules took a lenient approach to e-cigarettes, other than banning their sale to anyone younger than 18 and leaving it up to individual countries to set limits on where they could be used.