Plain packaging: a time for action

Abstract

It is almost thirty years since a senior vice president of marketing at British American Tobacco forewarned that tobacco products may eventually have to sell themselves through the pack.1 His prediction has now come true for countries with wide-ranging marketing controls. The tobacco industry has shown remarkable resilience and marketing ingenuity to continue promoting its wares, and the pack has become the focus of its efforts. The paper by Hammond et al. in this issue underlines this problem and demonstrates why the time has now come to mandate plain packaging.