Effects of package warnings on the demand of tobacco - Thesis Proposal Example

Section/# Demand and Warnings As medical science has come to better understand the long-term harm that smoking causes to both the smoker and those that might be exposed to the smoke and its effects, a general consensus and societal shift away from approval of smoking has been affected. Nevertheless, millions of individuals around the globe still smoke; partly due to the fact that one of the primary components of tobacco smoke is nicotine; a substance that has been proven to have a very highly addictive nature.

As governments and health care stakeholders have come to recognize that the costs to society are directly linked to the number of individuals that smoke, broad based movements towards decreasing smoking and seeking to break nicotine and/or tobacco dependence have been sought after. Necessarily, these stake holders have come to recognize that decreasing the demand for tobacco products has a direct level of impact on the negative effects that tobacco can cause within society as a whole. Not surprisingly, one the ways to decrease smoking and tobacco usage has been to utilize especially horrific warnings and direct representations of harm that such behavior can cause; invariably on the product itself.

Ultimately, the research that has thus far been conducted, within such articles as “Liability of Cigarette Manufacturers for Lung Cancer: An Analysis of the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act”, has indicated that these warning labels have not had the desired effect with respect to decreasing smoking and tobacco usage (Thornton, 2007).As a function of seeking to understand this topic to a more full and complete degree, the following research will be concentric upon researching two groups, a control and a test group.

The control will of course not be influenced by warnings and packaging as a function of tobacco legislation or government intrusion into consumer markets. However, the test group will have been exposed to such warnings and the researcher will seek to draw inference based upon how these groups score with respect to the overall rates of quitting tobacco products that they exhibit (Green, 2006). Ultimately, a noted difficulty within such a methodology is consistent with the fact that the test group and the control group will not be drawn from the same society or even nationality; due to the fact that legislative requirements for cigarette labeling and warnings do not exist in certain places of the globe.

However, the alternative to such a research design would be to reach back in history and seek to measure the overall rates of quitting tobacco products within the same nation as compared to the current era; an even more flawed approach – due to the fact that the societal approval of smoking has shifted greatly throughout the world over the past several decades. By utilizing the literature that currently exists on the topic and measuring the differentials between groups, it is the hope of this author that the proceeding study will be beneficial in assisting governments and other individuals to promote even more successful smoking cessation programs in the future.

ReferencesGreen, M. D. (2006). Cipollone Revisited: A Not So Little Secret About the Scope of Cigarette Preemption. Iowa L. Rev., 82, 1257.Thornton, J. C. (2007). Liability of Cigarette Manufacturers for Lung Cancer: An Analysis of the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act and Preemption of Strict Liability in Tort against Cigarette Manufacturers, The. Ky. LJ, 76, 569.