From brand to bland—the demise of cigarette packaging

Cigarette packs were the site of the world’s first tobacco control policies, when the first health warnings appeared in Britain and the United States from the mid-1960s. Tobacco companies have ever since sought to guard the integrity of the box—the “silent salesman” that is displayed to others many times each day—as their primary promotional vehicle.1 Industry has resisted every attempt to substitute bland, general cautions with explicit warnings, references to “addiction” and “kill,” and efforts to increase the size of …