Marlboro Box Defaced in Australia Where Future Is Now

Remember when a pack of smokes came with glitzy logos, rich foil sleeves, and romanticized language describing the pleasures within? Well, the future of marlboro cigarette packs is on display in Australia, and it’s not that pretty: large, graphic images of gangrenous limbs and cancer victims, with brand names printed in a uniform font on a background legally defined as “drab dark brown.”

Tobacco products complying with the world’s first plain- packaging laws have started arriving in stores, as an Oct. 1 manufacturing ban on the country’s A$10 billion ($10 billion) tobacco industry comes into force, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Oct. 8 issue. While a U.S. court in August blocked the first change to that country’s tobacco health warnings in more than two decades, more stringent plain- packaging rules like Australia’s are already being examined in the U.K., New Zealand, Turkey, and the European Union.

 “With so many countries lined up to ride on Australia’s coattails, what we hope to see is a domino effect for the good of public health,” Margaret Chan, the World Health Organization’s director-general, said in an August statement. Government standards set out the images and health warnings that must cover 75 percent of the front of cigarette packets -- a gangrenous foot, a tongue cancer, a toilet stained with bloody urine and a skeletal man named Bryan dying of lung cancer. Further warnings must appear on the sides and cover 90 percent of the back. Court Reasons The High Court of Australia today released its reasons for dismissing in August a challenge from tobacco companies that claimed the government illegally seized their intellectual property without proper compensation.

 The judges’ panel, led by Chief Justice Robert French, said in a 6-1 decision that because the government didn’t benefit from the removal of the trademarks, it didn’t have to compensate the companies and the law was valid. By requiring so much of the packaging to dramatically show that smoking is neither glamorous nor safe, health officials are betting they can create a greater deterrent than the postage- stamp-sized, health-related images that previously graced Australian packs.

 “The pictures are becoming bigger. You can’t ignore it,” said Ash Alhusban, fingering the butt end of a cigarette on a break from his job as co-manager of Opera Convenience, a small store 500 meters from the city’s opera house. “When I saw them I said, believe me, I will do my best to stop smoking.”