12.0 Introduction
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This chapter deals with the construction and labelling of Australian cigarettes, both at present and in the more recent past. Interest in how Australian cigarettes were constructed and labelled in the past is not merely historical. In order to understand the current variety of Australian cigarette brands and what interests the tobacco industry may have in producing them, it is necessary to understand forces that have been acting on the market over more extended time periods and have led to current arrangements.
During the past four decades, the Australian tobacco industry has concentrated heavily on the development of 'low tar' (or 'light' or 'mild') cigarettes. Until recently, Australian public health authorities believed erroneously that 'low tar' cigarettes would provide some relative health benefits to smokers who were unwilling or unable to quit.1 Public health authorities only began advising against the marketing of 'low tar' cigarettes during the past decade. The government has only followed up on this advice and taken action in the past few years. The policy shift occurred after strong evidence had accumulated that 'low tar' cigarettes do not deliver less 'tar' and nicotine to smokers' lungs under actual smoking conditions, are no less addictive and have not reduced disease or mortality rates among smokers.1 While the terms 'light', 'mild' and 'low tar' are no longer used as descriptors in the labelling of Australian cigarette brands and tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide figures no longer appear on the side of packs, nearly all of the particular varieties that were previously identified by these terms and tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide figures were still on the market at the time of writing. There is simply a new list of terms, such as 'smooth' and 'fine' that function as code words for 'light' and 'mild'. The combination of these terms with colour-coding to create the impression of substantive difference between brand varieties continues to invite smokers to believe that some cigarettes are less harmful than others.2
The information presented in this chapter derives from several sources. Most of what we know about the construction of Australian cigarettes has been gleaned from tobacco industry documents that were made public as a consequence of litigation in the United States in the 1990s, leading to the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between the major tobacco companies and the Attorneys General of most states. Various collections of these documents have been uploaded onto the World Wide Web on a number of websites and can be searched, using terms of interest. Many thousands of Australian industry documents are included in these collections. Also, a limited amount of information about the construction, smoke constituents and ingredients of Australian cigarettes has been made public as a result of a voluntary agreement on ingredients disclosure between the Australian manufacturers and the Australian Government in 2000.3 Finally, the Cancer Council Victoria has recently developed some capability for measuring certain design properties of cigarettes. These three information sources provide fragments of the overall picture, enabling a partial picture to be constructed of how the tobacco industry has manipulated cigarette design, packaging and labelling for its purposes. The tobacco industry doubtless retains a substantial knowledge advantage over the tobacco control community. Nonetheless, this partial picture has greater utility for development of effective tobacco control policies in future than the assumption that all cigarettes are essentially the same.
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