About

What is Face the Facts about?
What are the key messages being promoted?
Who is Face the Facts aimed at?
How will messages be communicated?
How was it decided to use these particular messages?
Will Face the Facts be evaluated?
Aren’t you telling people things they already know?
But isn’t smoking a personal choice?
Is Face the Facts telling people what to do?
What are the latest smoking facts and figures?
Who is behind Face the Facts?

What is Face the Facts about?

Tobacco is the single biggest cause of preventable death in New Zealand. Around 5,000 New Zealanders die each year as a result of smoking.

Face the Facts is a new tobacco control education initiative to inform New Zealanders about the facts surrounding tobacco use. It follows the successful second-hand smoke campaign that has seen a reduction in the number of people smoking in their homes.

Face the Facts has been designed to complement existing tobacco control initiatives and priorities and supports existing quit smoking messages.

What are the key messages being promoted?

The initial Face the Facts messages are:

5,000 New Zealanders die annually from smoking.
Nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) is safe and doubles your chances of quitting.
Kids who have a parent who smokes are three times more likely to become smokers.
Smoking robs your loved ones of 15 years of your life.
All cigarettes are deadly (including those with various descriptors eg, light and mild, rollies and tailor-made).

Who is Face the Facts aimed at?

Face the Facts messages are aimed at a range of audiences including smokers, friends and families of smokers, people in vulnerable population groups, and the New Zealand public in general.

How will messages be communicated?

Face the Facts messages will be communicated through television advertising, radio, web and outdoor advertising.

Face the Facts is supported by district health boards, public health units, iwi providers and others who work at the frontline. They will help spread the messages through their local communities.

How was it decided to use these particular messages?

Leading tobacco control academics were approached in the formative stages of Face the Facts to provide guidance on the most appropriate messages to communicate, based on common myths about smoking and tobacco use. A body of evidence was then gathered to support the messages.

Will Face the Facts be evaluated?

A baseline survey has been conducted to measure existing knowledge of the messages being communicated.

Aren’t you telling people things they already know?

Research shows that people have limited knowledge of the harms of smoking. For example, one-third of New Zealanders believe that the dangers of smoking have been exaggerated – with smokers more likely to think this.

As well as lacking general knowledge, people lack specific knowledge about the harms of smoking. Smokers underestimate their own personal level of risk of developing smoking-related diseases.

People who underestimate the health risks of smoking are less likely to think that quitting will reduce their chances of developing cancer. It is believed that these self-exempting beliefs allow smokers to rationalise their smoking behaviour.

Specific research findings include:

Some smokers believe they are less at risk than the average smoker of developing smoking-related diseases. ^1,2
Many smokers think they smoke too few cigarettes to be at risk of developing smoking-related diseases.³
A recent survey found that one-half of smokers believed ‘smoking is no more risky than a lot of other things people do’.⁴
This survey also found that one-third of New Zealanders believe that ‘the dangers of smoking have been exaggerated’. ⁵^,⁶
The World Health Organization (2008) says, ‘relatively few tobacco users worldwide fully grasp its health risks’.⁷
A 2006 International Tobacco Control study reported that smokers have a limited understanding of the link between smoking and serious diseases and strokes. Awareness and knowledge was particularly low among low SES groups.⁸
A 2006 review of research from Australia and Canada concluded that the majority of smokers underestimate the risks of smoking and have low understanding of the specific diseases caused by smoking.⁹

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But isn’t smoking a personal choice?

The nicotine in cigarettes means smoking goes, very quickly, from being a choice to being an addiction.

People get addicted to smoking as adolescents, much more easily than they thought they would, and then find it very difficult to stop.

In addition, kids don’t choose for their parents to become smokers, something that makes it more likely that those kids will be smokers themselves as young people and adults.

The friends and relatives of the 5,000 people who die each year because of smoking did not choose to lose a loved one.

Is Face the Facts telling people what to do?

Face the Facts aims to give people information about tobacco-related harm. It seeks to increase New Zealanders’ knowledge and awareness of the issues surrounding tobacco and its use, as well as dispelling myths and encouraging people to quit.

What are the latest smoking facts and figures?

The 2008 New Zealand Health Survey¹⁰ shows:

19.9 percent of New Zealand adults, aged 15 to 64, are smokers
42.2 percent of Maori are smokers
26.9 percent of Pacific peoples are smokers.

Daily smoking prevalence among 14-15 year olds in 2007 was 7% compared to 12% in 2003 and 16% in 1999. Students are significantly less likely to be a smoker in 2007 compared to 2003 and 1999.¹¹