The long struggle for cigarette warnings has lessons for alcohol labels, experts say
CBC
Stop us if you've heard this one before: A popular product promises relaxation and reward, with a hint of sex appeal. Experts say it causes cancer and should carry a warning label. Many people say the warnings won't work. The industry is less than thrilled.
Ring any bells?
Since the day in 1963 when Minister of National Health and Welfare Judy LaMarsh declared in the House of Commons that smoking causes lung cancer, Canada has been among the world leaders in anti-smoking initiatives, including warning labels.
Sixty years later, experts are warning that alcohol is a cancer risk and its packaging should get similar treatment.
While the two stories are similar, people who have spent years studying or promoting anti-tobacco advocacy say alcohol labelling does not need to play out the same way — arduously and incrementally.
"I think we've learned a lot from from the endlessly long, drawn-out steps," said Geoffrey Fong, a professor at the University of Waterloo and an investigator with both the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project.
"I think we can go right to doing what's right."
Starting with LaMarsh's warning — which came the year before a renowned U.S. Surgeon General's report that confirmed smoking triggered lung cancer in men — Canada has been at the vanguard of smoking regulations.
It was the first country to ban smoking on all domestic airline flights in 1987 and international flights of its domestic airlines in 1994. Calgary was the first city to host a smoke-free Olympics in 1988. And Canada was the first country to implement health warnings with pictures on cigarette packages, in 2001.
But none of it was easy.
Garfield Mahood, who proudly recounts his decades with the now-defunct Non-Smokers' Rights Association, says getting specific, graphic warnings on cigarette packaging was a long struggle against hesitant politicians and litigious tobacco companies.
"By God, they did not want the packages to have these warnings in Canada," he said.
Canada has had several phases of tobacco warning labels.
Before the late 1980s, there were voluntary warnings, including a request to "avoid inhaling."
The Rachel Notley government's consumer carbon tax wound up becoming a weapon the UCP wielded to drum the Alberta NDP out of office. But that levy-and-repayment program, and the wide-ranging "climate leadership plan" around it, also stood as the NDP's boldest, provincial-reputation-altering move in their single-term tenure.