Cancer experts want shock photos on cigarette packs

“The government must finally act,” Martina Pötschke-Langer, a cancer researcher in Heidleberg, told Der Tagesspiegel newspaper on Sunday.

She said it was scientifically proven that warning labels supported by such images are especially effective in preventing young people from smoking.

The drug expert for the centre-left Social Democrats, Angelika Graf, said she supported the idea, but according to the government’s drug office there are no such plans to put such pictures on cigarette packages.

Germany is instead waiting for guidelines from the European Union, according to the federal office dealing with drug issues.

Graphic photos of the effects of smoking are already on cigarette packages in Belgium, France and Great Britain, according to the German Cancer Research Centre.

DAPD/The Local/mw