Individual cigarettes to be inscribed with warning

TORONTO — Every individual cigarette sold in Canada will carry a warning message under the terms of a new federal regulation intended to curb smoking, especially among young people, the country’s minister of mental health and addictions announced.

The individual warning label, said to be the first in the world, will supplement the warning messages already printed on cigarette boxes in Canada, a country where smoking rates have fallen sharply over the past few decades.

Young people who share cigarettes and don’t read the package labels would be able to see the health warning on individual cigarettes, said Rob Cunningham, a senior policy analyst at the Canadian Cancer Society.

Smoking is on the decline in the Canada, according to 2020 data from Statistics Canada, the national census agency, which showed a 3% drop between 2015 and 2019. The percentage of smokers in the country fell to 10% in 2020. About half of all Canadians smoked in 1965, according to the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

But more than 20 billion cigarettes are sold each year in Canada, according to the Canadian Cancer Society. Although vaping is more frequent among younger Canadians, Statistics Canada data shows that as of 2022, 4% of the country’s smokers were younger than 19.

A spokesperson for the Canadian subsidiary of tobacco giant Philip Morris International said the company supports Canada’s new regulation.

“We share a common goal with Health Canada — eliminating cigarettes and making Canada smoke-free by 2035 or sooner,” said Jeff Gaulin, spokesperson for Rothmans, Benson and Hedges.

Health Canada, the nation’s health agency, is proposing that the warning — “Poison in every puff ” — be printed on the cigarette paper around the filter.

Researchers expressed skepticism that the warnings would have a strong affect.

A better way to reduce youth smoking would be to decrease the availability of cigarettes, commonly sold at corner stores and gas stations in Canada, and raise taxes on them, said Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit and a professor at the University of Toronto.

Schwartz supports the new regulations and said they “could have a moderate effect” on youth smoking, adding, “I’m not head over heels that this is going to solve our problem . ... The truth is that most young people know that cigarettes are not good for you.”

Dr. Christopher Carlsten, head of the respiratory medicine division at the University of

British Columbia, said he is not sure that the scientific literature backing the placement of a warning on each cigarette is “compelling.”

“But nonetheless, I certainly don’t see any harm,” he said. “And I would be predisposed to think that it’s likely helpful just based on the overall mass of literature on the benefits of warnings.”

Canada has some of the highest cigarette taxes in the world, according to a 2020 cigarette-tax scorecard published by Tobacconomics, a research organization. Australia and New Zealand rank first.