Ensuring smokers are adequately informed: reflections on consumer rights, manufacturer responsibilities, and policy implications

Abstract

The right to information is a fundamental consumer value. Following the advent of health warnings, the tobacco industry has repeatedly asserted that smokers are fully informed of the risks they take, while evidence demonstrates widespread superficial levels of awareness and understanding. There remains much that tobacco companies could do to fulfil their responsibilities to inform smokers. We explore issues involved in the meaning of “adequately informed” smoking and discuss some of the key policy and regulatory implications. We use the idea of a smoker licensing scheme—under which it would be illegal to sell to smokers who had not demonstrated an adequate level of awareness—as a device to explore some of these issues. We also explore some of the difficulties that addiction poses for the notion that smokers might ever voluntarily assume the risks of smoking.

Tobacco-Related Chronic Illnesses: A Public Health Concern for Jamaica

“…Chapman and Liberman (2005) posits that being fully or adequately informed involved having heard that smoking increases health risks; being aware that particular diseases like lung cancer and emphysema; accurately appreciating the meaning, severity, and probabilities of developing tobacco related diseases; and smokers agreeing that their smoking poses significant risk to their own health. Having reviewed international evidence on smokers' recognition of vulnerability to harm, Weinstein (2001) posits that while smokers have a reasonably accurate perception of the health risks faced by smokers as a group and acknowledge some risk, there is a tendency to believe that the risk applies more to other smoker than themselves.…”

The ‘moral career’ of cigarette smokers: A French survey

“…According to Chapman and Liberman (2005), there are four levels of information (having heard that smoking increases health risks; being aware that specific diseases are caused by smoking; accurately appreciating the meaning, severity, and probabilities of developing smoking-related diseases; personally accepting that the risks inherent in other levels apply to one's own risk of contracting such diseases), and a smoker must have reached the fourth level to be considered fully informed. From this point of view, the 'optimism bias' demonstrates a lack of information and most smokers, if not all, are not fully informed.…”

Informed decision making

“…There is a general legal principle that states that where there is a reasonable duty to warn, the warning must be conveyed with force sufficient to reflect the degree of danger involved (Edwards, 2005 greater the magnitude of a risk (that is, the more likely an adverse outcome will occur), and the more severe the consequences if the risk materializes, the more important the obligation to disclose (Chapman, 2005).…”