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Strict legislation in terms of smoking has imposed the feeling of marginalization to more and more smokers in Australia, said a report released by the Australian National University (ANU) on Thursday.
Researcher Associate Professor Simone Dennis of ANU's School of Archaeology and Anthropology said that legislation such as plain packaging and designated smoke-free zones served to "denormalize" smoking, which can lead to smokers being treated as community outsiders.
"You denormalize smoking by making it appear very dangerous," Dennis said.
"I witnessed a lot of cases of people being abused for breathing smoke on someone else by accident, or if wind picked up and their smoke travelled."
The research findings of the 10-year anthropological study have been published in a book, Smokefree, which documents the changing experience of smokers as Australia introduced world leading anti-tobacco laws.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics 2014-15 National Health Survey revealed 14.5 percent of adults were daily smokers, down from 16 percent in 2011-12 when plain packaging legislation was brought in.
Dennis found that those who continued to smoke devised a range of methods for negating health messages, particularly with the smoking related health images.
"People would often not look at it, or put stickers over the top of it so they wouldn't have to deal with it," she said.
"When people received a packet that in some way upset them, they would ask for it to be swapped. So if blokes got the packet about pregnancy and smoking harming unborn babies, they were quite comfortable with those."
Dennis also found that it was common for people to distort the meaning of the health messages being communicated.
"It's not as straight forward as telling people smoking is dangerous and once they have that information they will stop. People are creative in developing meaning from messages," she said.
"I spoke to a group of pregnant 16-year-old girls who were smoking to reduce the birthweight of their baby."
"They were scared because they were small. The worst thing that could happen to them was to have an enormous baby. They had read on packets that smoking can reduce the birth weight of your baby, which is obviously not how the public health message is intended to be taken."
Dennis took a neutral stance on the issue of smoking, but said she received a large volume of complaints from people unhappy with her approach.
"I'm not trying to encourage people to smoke or get them to stop. I'm just trying to understand their experience," she said.
The results of the study have been developed into a book, Smokefree, which is available on the website of publishers Bloomsbury.
