A MOVE to deglamourize smoking is hoped to stop children from taking up the deadly habit.
Tomorrow is "World No Tobacco Day" and Cornwall Council's director of public health, Felicity Owen, said she is committed to stopping a new generation of youngsters from starting the habit.
In Cornwall about 160 children aged between 11 and 15 start smoking every month while in the South West one in three of 16-24 year olds smoke.
To tackle the issue the department wants to stop the last legal form of tobacco advertising in the county by standardised packaging of cigarettes.
She said: "Research shows that children are overwhelmingly more likely to be attracted by designed tobacco packs, than when tobacco products are shifted into toned down standardised packs.
"With regulation in place to restrict television, radio and other advertising, packaging is becoming more and more important to the tobacco industry to help sell their products.
"The new law would be a logical extension of reforms brought in over the past 15 years which have seen a ban on cigarette advertising, the banning of smoking in offices, pubs and other indoor public places and, most recently, the ban on displaying cigarettes openly in supermarkets and small retailers.
"We are part of the first campaign in the northern hemisphere to call for a change to the way tobacco companies market their products in the UK.
"Britain could and should lead Europe in introducing standardised packaging for cigarettes."
The Department of Health ran a public consultation on whether to introduce standardised packaging between April 2012 and August 2012.
This stimulated hundreds of thousands of comments, and is according to Ms Owen clearly an issue which engages people especially parents – whether they smoke or not.
Information generated by the consultation, which closed in August 2012, is still being analysed by health officials but previous research has shown that 64 per cent of the public support standard packaging for cigarette packs.
In December last year, Australia became the first country in the world to put all tobacco products in standard olive coloured packs, labelled simply with the brand name and the graphic warnings.
The idea is to make them less eye-catching with bigger health warnings so that the message they contains becomes more effective to the user and stops smokers believing that some cigarette brands are less harmful than others.
She continued: "Established adult smokers rarely change the brand of tobacco they smoke and the vast majority know which brand they will ask for before they walk into a shop.
"Therefore, new, young smokers are the primary target of industry marketing. Brand imagery is much more important to younger age groups and they respond more effectively to it than older groups.
"Moving to standardised packaging would therefore reduce brand appeal and reduce smoking initiation.
"If we can give young people one less reason to start by deglamourising smoking, it will help contribute to massive savings for the health service."
In 2008, 23% of people in the South West smoked, above the national average of 22%. Today, this figure has dropped to 19.8%, according to the Integrated Household Survey. This is significantly below the national average of 20.7%.
Estimates suggest that as many as 22,000 young people aged 11-15 smoke in the South West, a figure that grows by 45 every day.
Smokefree South West aims to accelerate the reduction in smoking prevalence further to 18% by 2015 and 10% by 2030.
For more information about the standardised packaging of tobacco campaign please go to www.PlainPacksProtect.co.uk
