Section 7: Challenges of Regulation

7. Challenges of Regulation > Global Regulation of Tobacco > Lecture

• In 2012, Professor Gregory Connolly, a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, reported that tobacco had killed one hundred million people during the 20th century, and that it could cost a billion lives in the 21st century.
• The Australian lawyer Neil Francey proposed in 1999 that the production and sale of tobacco products arguably constitutes a crime against humanity.
• Even if the directors and executives of tobacco companies did not intend to cause harm, he added, such conduct is comparable to manslaughter, where death is an unintended consequence of a recklessly negligent act.
• When in 2012 the High Court of Australia ruled six to one in favor of requiring cigarette packaging to display public health warnings and graphic pictures of smoking-related diseases, even the dissenting judge called the manufacturers of tobacco products purveyors of lies and death.
• The official global consensus on the medical damage done by tobacco is expressed in the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which was adopted by the 56th World Health Assembly on May 21, 2003, and went into effect on February 27, 2005.
• The spread of the tobacco epidemic is facilitated through a variety of complex factors with cross-border effects, including trade liberalization and direct foreign investment.
• Other factors, such as global marketing, transnational tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship, and the international movement of contraband and counterfeit cigarettes, have also contributed to the explosive increase in tobacco use.
• The story of how the global tobacco industry has prospered despite the regulatory measures enforced by the WHO and by many countries is a lesson in how political power is exercised in the age of market globalism.
• The trans-nationalization of marketing and promotion of harmful commodities such as tobacco is one important component of globalized public health threats.
• Industry strategists, the health experts report, are encouraging the homogenization of the global tobacco industries and the creation of a new global shared culture enshrined in the concept of a global smoker.
• From the perspective of the tobacco companies, they are the ones who must defend the rights of these global smokers from the machinations of the governments that are trying to save them from a lifetime of smoking and its terrible costs.
• The uniquely perverse feature of the struggles between nations and tobacco companies is that it is human beings, not local economies, who are being ruined.
• In the case of the Australian Packaging Law of 2012, British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International, a veritable global alliance for lung cancer, filed suit against the Australian government claiming that the Tobacco Plain Packaging Act amounted to an acquisition of property.
• Dr. Chan’s optimism about the prospects for putting big tobacco out of business was due to the fact that a nation state had won a clear-cut legal victory over the tobacco multinationals and their army of lawyers and lobbyists.
• Any prognosis regarding the future of tobacco consumption must take into account the legal and political war the transnational tobacco companies have been waging against countries that attempt to reduce tobacco use, and against the World Health Organization itself.
• This is a global campaign, directed at limits imposed on the advertising of tobacco products, the size of health warnings on cigarette packages, the placement of disturbing images of smoking-related disease effects on packages, and higher cigarette taxes.
• This strategy offered the additional advantage of focusing entirely on treaty rights, while distracting attention away from the proven relationship between tobacco and disease.
• Philip Morris also sued Brazil, claiming that its proposed cigarette packaging images of tobacco-related disease were inaccurate, and that the display of such images would vilify tobacco companies.
• The secret and underhanded political strategies of the tobacco multinationals were revealed in detail in 2000 with the release of a World Health Organization document titled “Tobacco Company Strategies to Undermine Tobacco Control Activities.
• ” According to the director general of the WHO, the tobacco companies had made efforts to prevent implementation of public health policy and efforts to reduce funding of tobacco control within UN organizations.
• Manipulating the scientific and public debate about the health effects of tobacco, and secret monitoring of WHO meetings and conferences.
• A principal strategy of the tobacco multinationals has been to persuade developing countries that tobacco control is a first-world issue that threatens their economic viability.
• Giving up tobacco as a cash crop would, the companies warned, produce economic destabilization in tobacco growing countries.
• Tobacco control would cost more than the health damage done by the use of tobacco, they said.
• Tobacco companies had been focusing their marketing efforts on developing countries in Africa and Asia, precisely because successful anti-tobacco measures in the first-world have greatly reduced the number of smokers in developed societies.
• The nature of the African predicament became clear in 2007 when the Nigerian federal government filed a suit in the high court of Abuja against British American Tobacco, Philip Morris International, and International Tobacco Limited.
• It was not enforcing two tobacco control laws that were already on the books, and it was afraid that Nigerian lawsuits against the tobacco companies might deter other multinationals from investing in Nigeria.