Written by Anna Blackwell, Senior Research Associate
The manufacturing or importing of packs of cigarettes with fewer than 20 cigarettes per pack was prohibited in the UK when the EU Tobacco Products Directive and standardised packaging legislation were fully implemented in May 2017. This change was aimed at reducing the affordability of cigarettes and thereby discouraging young people from smoking. This directive also required the removal of branding and established a standard shape and dark green colour for packaging, including pictorial health warnings, which prevented the use of packaging for promotion and reduced its appeal.
However, the tobacco industry has been able to exploit loopholes in recent packaging regulations, including the absence of a regulated maximum pack size, by introducing non-standard and larger pack sizes to the market to distinguish products. This is a public health concern given evidence that larger pack sizes are linked to increased smoking, and could undermine existing tobacco control success.
In a recent Addiction Opinion and Debate paper, we proposed that a cap on cigarette pack size should be introduced; a pragmatic solution would be to permit only a single pack size of 20, which is now the minimum in many countries. This approach would reduce the number of cigarettes in packs in several countries such as Australia – where packs up to sizes of 50 are available – and prevent larger sizes being introduced elsewhere.
Capping cigarette pack size therefore has the potential to both reduce smoking and prevent increased smoking. While the health benefits of reducing smoking alone are small, it may have important indirect effects on health through its role in facilitating quitting. Those smoking fewer cigarettes per day are more likely to attempt to quit and succeed in doing so. Trials of smoking-reduction interventions have also found that these can lead to increased quitting when combined with nicotine replacement therapy.
Our Opinion and Debate paper drew on evidence from a range of sources including industry documents and analyses, population surveys, intervention trials and Mendelian randomization analyses. Together these suggest that consumption increases with larger pack size, and cessation increases with reduced consumption. However, direct experimental evidence is not currently available to determine whether pack size influences the amount of tobacco consumed, or whether the association is due to other factors.
People who want to quit may be using smaller packs as a method of self-control, and smokers who successfully cut down and later quit may be more motivated to do so. Cost is also an important factor and larger packs may be linked to increased smoking because they have a lower cost per cigarette. Further research is needed to determine whether the associations between pack size, smoking and cessation are causal to estimate the impact of policies to cap cigarette pack size.
Commentaries on our Opinion and Debate paper, published in the May 2020 Issue of Addiction highlight the need to understand the mechanisms for the associations observed between pack size and smoking in order to identify the optimal cigarette pack size. Although mandating packs of 20 is a pragmatic approach, pack size regulation needs to achieve a compromise between tobacco affordability and smokers’ self-regulation. Nevertheless, the policy debate should start now to address this neglected aspect of tobacco control.
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