A few years ago, several countries decided to take a legislative measure that many questioned: to place images with warnings about the damage that cigarettes could cause in the body. Now a study from the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Waterloo have confirmed that such warnings have reduced smoking rates in the population more than was initially believed.
To conduct the study, the researchers compared rates of tobacco use in the United States and Canada for nine years before and after the graphic warnings were introduced on the packages. In the Canadian case, there was a drop in consumption of between 2.9 and 4.7 percent , which would mean a decrease of between 5.3 and 8.6 million smokers in the United States.
This new research contradicts data from the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) which had estimated a reduction in consumption with warning labels of 0.88 percent . This difference in the percentage of decrease is due, according to Jidong Huang, a specialist at the University of Illinois and lead author of the study, to the fact that there were certain methodological flaws in the previous data. According to Huang and his team, when the price of cigarettes was taken into account in the analyzes, they found that the prevalence of tobacco use was much higher.
For University of Waterloo psychology professor Geoffrey Fong, the new study “adds to the strong and growing number of studies that show the positive impact of graphic warnings in reducing smoking rates .” And, although more than 40 countries around the world, as in the case of Spain, already force tobacco companies to include this type of message, in the United States this measure has not yet been implemented.
The researchers’ conclusions have been published in the specialized journal Tobacco Control .
