By Marie Marin
With photos of rotting teeth and cancerous lungs, the new graphic warnings on cigarette packs are causing headaches for some local smoke shop owners and translating into profits for others.
Pravin Rajans, owner of the Esquire Smoke Shop on Bank Street, says the new packs have caused strained customer relations.
“Some people find the pictures very offensive,” he says, pulling a pack off the shelf and laying it on the counter. It features a warning about smoker’s increased risk of heart problems with a photo of a human heart. “Nobody wants this,” he says, “and it’s costing me money.”
It’s been three months since Health Canada began enforcing the colour photo warnings on cigarette packs. They feature everything from close-ups of cancer lumps, damaged brain cells, hearts, and decaying teeth, to more subtle images of pregnant women, graphs, drooping cigarettes and overflowing ashtrays.
The first phase of the new labelling affects the more popular brands, such as Player’s and du Maurier.
Other tobacco products will follow suit in June.
Rajans says the new labels make his customers more choosy about the packs they buy, leading to lost business for his store.
“I have so many (packs) that I haven’t been able to sell,” he says. “Some people want me to open up the cartons just to find the one they want. I can’t do that anymore.”
Rajans says some customers have even taken their business elsewhere because he was unable to offer them their preferred design.
But some people are profiting from smoker’s reactions to the graphic warnings. Quebec artists André Letellier and Neville Smith have produced decorative sleeves for the new packs called CIGslips. They feature abstract designs and pictures of fish, horses, airplanes and hockey rinks.
Letellier says they sell most of their CIGslips to vendors in the Ottawa area, but are finding markets all over Canada.
“Business has been really good,” Letellier says, “I expected that right from the beginning.”
Rajans says his store ran out of CIGslips and he is awaiting the next shipment.
Alph May, owner of Bud’s Smoke Shop on O’Connor Street, says the pictures on the warnings “may actually be increasing my cigarette sales.”
May says young men in their late teens and early twenties often request the pack depicting impotency with a picture of a drooping cigarette. “They think it’s funny,” he says. “From what I’ve seen, it’s had a completely reverse effect.”
Though both May and Rajans say the new warnings are doing little to stop their customers from smoking, the Canadian Cancer Society says it’s too early to tell.
Health Canada began collecting data on the effectiveness of the graphics last month, and will have their final report available by May.