Pat Sidley
SPORTS sponsorship received a major boost this week when the Department of Health announced stringent new regulations for advertising and packaging tobacco products.
With both packets and adverts re-quired to carry visible health warnings, sports sponsorship may look to the to-bacco companies as the only way to go.
The new regulations take effect on May 31 next year — international no-smoking day. The regulations, which will fall under the Tobacco Products Control Act, were announced by Minister of Health Dr Nkosasana Zuma in Pretoria. The manner of the announcement marked a pronounced shift in the way the new government has handled the pressure from the tobacco companies. Zuma was flanked by anti-smoking lobbyists, who lent weight to her arguments with statistics and illustrations from several other countries.
A major grey area already used extensively by tobacco companies to market their products will be the subject of further wrangling: that of sports sponsorships. Other problematic areas have not been dealt with at all. Cigarettes sold singly, for example, are not regulated, and even although it is illegal to sell tobacco products to children, many of the customers for single cigarettes are under age.
Fifteen percent of the front surface of cigarette packets sold from May 31 will have a warning from a range of possibilities including: “Danger: Smoking can kill you”; “Pregnant? Breastfeeding? Your smoking can harm your baby”; “Warning: Don’t smoke near children”; “Tobacco is addictive”.
On the back of the pack, covering 25 percent of the surface, the point will be made clearer with one of eight possible text blocks continuing the theme. They are all vivid — and frightening. Among them is: “Nine out of 10 patients with lung cancer are smokers. Smoking also causes cancer of the lip, mouth, voice box, food pipe and bladder. Quitting smoking reduces your risk of cancer.”
While the warning on the front will take up less space than in Canada or Iceland (25 percent and 29 percent respectively), the message is clear. It is aimed chiefly at stopping children from beginning to smoke, said Zuma, as well as preventing adults from starting.
All advertisements, including those on the radio — a medium that reaches black youngsters –will have to be accompanied by the warnings. Tobacconists will have to withdraw old stock that does not carry the new warnings.
The tobacco industry had claimed it could not design a package adequately which contained all the required warnings in the required typefaces. Yusuf Salojee of the Council Against Smoking produced a bottle containing a chemical on which most of the label had been given over to explaining the toxic hazards of the chemical inside. “The bottom line here is: warnings must warn. And if they are hidden they do not warn,” he said tartly.
A question about sponsorships such as the Rothmans July Handicap drew a sharp response from Zuma. She said that as a Durbanite she had had several occasions to attend the July. She had asked people to clear away all the cigarette advertising from around her and to remove all the cigarettes they were hoping punters would smoke.
She was under no illusions, she said, that sports sponsorships were not charity, but rather advertising, and were used to sell tobacco products.
Did that mean, then, that cricketers would have to have warnings on their shirts when they were emblazened with the name of the sponsoring cigarette? That required more thought, as did the question of whether the name of of the game as in “Benson & Hedges cricket” required a warning.
Sponsorships in countries in the former eastern bloc had caused Salojee and the Medical Research Council’s Derek Yach to raise an eyebrow; tobacco companies were using traffic lights to advertise (Camel advertised on the amber light) and rival companies had bought tram lines to sell their wares.
Among the submissions the department received opposing the regulations were a batch from newspaper companies. The minister said her department had compromised on advertising restrictions originally planned because the tobacco industry had conceded the government’s right to make the regulations. It was only fair after that, she said, to hear their problems and make some compromise.