Scary pictures to help you quit smoking
10/11/2007 India Sanchita Sharma, Hindustan Times (www.hindustantimes.com) Buying cigarettes may not be a pleasant experience from December 1 as grim pictures of cancerous tumours or an ailing infant will be printed on the packet of your favourite brand. Despite pressure from the bidi and gutkha industries, the pictures have been included as part of a government campaign against tobacco. They will be used on packets of all tobacco products. “The revised Packaging and Labelling Rules, 2007, have been notified for the smoking and non-smoking forms of tobacco,” said Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss. Following recommendations from a group of ministers – Pranab Mukherjee, Priya Ranjan Das Munshi, Oscar Fernandes, Kamal Nath, Jaipal Reddy and Ramadoss himself made up the panel – set up to review the “merits and demerits” of pictorial warnings, the skull-and-crossbones sign was dropped as also was the idea to give a picture of a dead body. These were found too offensive. A tobacco product will now carry the warning “tobacco kills” along with a picture that shows one of the following - smoking causes cancer, your smoking kills babies, tobacco causes painful death and tobacco causes mouth cancer. Over 250 million people in the country use tobacco products like gutka, cigarettes and bidis. Tobacco kills at least 10 lakh people in India every year, said the Indian Council of Medical Research. One in two Indian men and one in seven women uses tobacco, which causes 40 per cent of all cancers. "Pictures definitely have an impact. Pictorial [...]