Iceland Aims to Make Smokers See Results of Habit

A tough new anti-smoking law goes into effect in Iceland today, forcing manufacturers to label all tobacco products with illustrations such as a pair of black lungs, a patient in bed, or a diseased heart.

The new law also prohibits stores from displaying tobacco products, makes it illegal to smoke in government buildings or buses, and requires restaurants to set aside no-smoking areas.

The new law specifies that all packages of cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco and snuff must carry a printed health warning and one of six illustrations: black lungs, a patient in bed, a pregnant mother, a diseased heart and coronary system, an inflamed throat and nose, and young children.

The illustrations are to be evenly distributed, so that no one illustration is used more than any other.

There is a specific health warning for each illustration. For example, the figure of a pregnant mother will be accompanied by the warning: “Smoking during pregnancy threatens the health of mother and child.”

Together with the printed text, the marking must measure at least 1.2 inches by 1.6 inches, about a third of one side of an average cigarette pack.

Tobacco producers, most of them American companies, are to pay the cost of the new markings.

“Some of the American producers have protested against the new law and the markings and have threatened to stop selling cigarettes to Iceland,” Johnsen said. “I don’t, however, believe it will come to that.”

Fridrik Theodorrson, of the Icelandic agents for R.J. Reynolds, said the “American manufacturers are unhappy about this.”