Poland Activists Make Gains (fwd)

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

 April 8, 1999

 Polish Activists Make Headway
 In Fight Against Tobacco Use

 By DANIEL MICHAELS 
 Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

 WARSAW -- Even after years of fighting tobacco, Witold Zatonski didn't
 realize how deeply he had penetrated Poland's cigarette industry.

 Unknown to the Polish health advocate, his words hang framed in the
 Warsaw office of Philip Morris Cos., in the form of a letter he wrote to Bill
 Clinton asking the U.S. president to tighten controls on U.S. tobacco
 companies' international marketing.

 "It's kind of a joke," says Margaret Kowalczyk, the company's
 corporate-affairs director, with a laugh as she glances at the 1993 missive
 on her wall.

 But Dr. Zatonski, who runs Poland's Health Promotion Foundation, is no
 joke. "He's very skillful and charismatic," says Ms. Kowalczyk in a more
 serious tone, adding, "Poland has a very sophisticated and effective
 antitobacco lobby."

 Poland?

 Hints of Change

 For years, Poles have smoked 118 packs per person annually, more
 cigarettes per person than almost anywhere in the world. Leading global
 tobacco companies have invested around $1 billion here over the past
 decade to buy and develop Polish cigarette factories, and they spend
 millions more each year to market their products. Cigarette smoke wafts
 down streets, clouds cafes and permeates the clothes of the person next to
 you on the bus.

 But out of this haze, some hints of change are emerging. Unlike in the U.S.,
 where tobacco wars have been fought largely through lawsuits, Poland's
 elected politicians have taken the lead in tobacco control. As a result,
 cigarettes sold in Poland now carry some of Europe's largest and most
 explicit health warnings, featuring such messages as "Smoking tobacco
 causes cancer." Excise taxes are rising steadily, as is the number of places
 where smoking is forbidden. Tobacco advertising already faces tight
 restrictions, and they could soon get tougher. Cigarette consumption has
 leveled off over recent years, and dropped significantly among some
 groups, such as middle-age men.

 "Poland really is a leader in tobacco control in the region," says Barbara
 Zolty at the World Health Organization's Tobacco-Free Initiative in
 Geneva, who credits Dr. Zatonski's movement with putting Poland out
 front on the issue. "Dropping tobacco consumption is a concrete example
 of success," she adds.

 'Huge Marketing Opportunity'

 Yet kids still buy cigarettes almost as easily as chewing gum, while women
 are lighting up ever faster. Big tobacco keeps pushing, too, lobbying to roll
 back restrictions and delay new controls, which it calls futile.

 Poland's anti-smoking activists "do have an impact," says Anna Kozerska,
 corporate-affairs manager at British American Tobacco PLC in Warsaw,
 but they "are not achieving their objective" of reducing consumption.
 Instead, she argues, they "only cause upheaval in the market."

 So now comes the real test for Dr. Zatonski and colleagues: They shaped
 legislators' thinking toward smoking, but can they change smokers' habits?

 "We dream that we will be able to repeat the experience in the United
 States," says the 56-year-old epidemiology professor, of America's sharp
 drop in smoking over recent years. "Until now, our work was mainly
 opportunistic because we didn't have the right resources," says the stocky
 sports addict, who stands nearly two meters tall and still moves with the
 energy of a young athlete. So far, he has focused most of that energy on
 racing from conference to meeting, browbeating Polish politicians and
 fellow doctors about the health impact of tobacco.

 "Now we want to use a proper marketing approach to achieve our goals,"
 he explains. Dr. Zatonski and his team are enlisting a new breed of
 well-heeled allies who see profit in promoting health: Western
 pharmaceutical giants and sports-gear brands. Drug companies like
 Pharmacia & Upjohn Inc. and SmithKline Beecham PLC, which make
 nicotine-replacement products, want to sell products to help people quit
 smoking, he says, while athletic-product makers have "a huge marketing
 opportunity" promoting sports and health among 39 million Poles.

 Unlikely Sidekick

 At the same time, he is calling on U.S. health-advocacy groups to train
 lobbyists across Eastern Europe in "marketing and achieving goals."
 Spearheading this drive is his unlikely American sidekick, Scott Thompson.

 A self-described "aimless, unambitious Californian," Mr. Thompson, 34,
 drifted from Tenerife in the Canary Islands to Poland in 1990 to teach
 English. Incensed at seeing how American cigarette makers were wooing
 his teenage students, the wiry basketball fanatic discovered his "obsession"
 in educating Poles about the health risks of smoking. A year ago, he moved
 to Warsaw from the small northern city of Torun to work with Dr.
 Zatonski.

 "When Scott came here, he was a real greenhorn," says Dr. Zatonski, who
 dubs his acolyte the "Anti-Marlboro Man." "Now he's getting better and
 better," he adds.

 Dr. Zatonski, who serves as top health-policy adviser to Poland's deputy
 finance minister, says he has improved at promoting health himself. A
 doctor of internal medicine in Poland during the 1960s, he saw that most of
 his young patients with heart attacks were heavy smokers. After training in
 Western Europe in the late 1970s, where he learned of smoking's potential
 health risks, he returned home and "realized tobacco was one of the main
 reasons we had such high premature mortality in Poland."

 Sitting in front of large bowl of fruit on a table in his office, a picture of
 himself with Pope John Paul II displayed above his desk, Dr. Zatonski
 recalls that in communist Poland he was "under heavy attack from
 colleagues who said it was nonsense to suggest controlling cancer by
 controlling smoking." He also got a warning from communist authorities for
 a 1986 comment in the Western media criticizing the government's
 promotion of cigarettes, vodka and fatty sausage as a way "to keep people
 quiet." So he began collecting data and organizing conferences to make his
 case.

 Open Competition

 When communism collapsed in 1989, he had "many new possibilities" to
 work the media, lobby politicians and ally with international organizations.
 He built close ties with the World Bank, the Centers for Disease Control in
 Atlanta and the World Health Organization, which set up a
 cancer-monitoring center at his office in 1995.

 But global tobacco marketers also descended on free-market Poland,
 investing heavily in manufacturing, marketing and lobbying.

 "I underestimated the power of the international tobacco industry," recalls
 Dr. Zatonski, who never imagined in 1991 that it would take him five years
 to dragoon Poland's parliament into passing a strict tobacco-control law. "I
 was learning how to speak with politicians and the mass me dia," he adds.

 Mr. Thompson had a similar education. Back in his teaching days, he
 would slip anti-smoking messages into his English lectures. On weekends
 he took to showing up at rock concerts and sports events sponsored by
 cigarette companies to hand out homemade antismoking pamphlets.

 "I wasn't too effective," he admits sheepishly. Today, he hooks Poland into
 a global network of health advocates via the Internet and his fax machine,
 bombarding the local media with news about anti-tobacco movements
 around the world.

 Big tobacco is trying to assess the impact of this Polish-American duo on
 its business. Although overall cigarette consumption is slipping in Poland,
 the big losers so far have been communist-era brands. Sales of
 high-profit-margin Western light cigarettes, menthols and premium brands
 are surging.

 "I don't think it can have much impact in the short term," says Leo
 Sorensen, chairman of Eastern Europe at upscale Danish cigarette maker
 House of Prince. "But a lobbying group, long term it could have an impact,
 if you say things enough for a long time," he adds.

 It has already had an impact on Grazyna Rakowska.

 "I want to quit because smoking makes me feel bad," says the young
 professional, shielding her cigarette from the wind outside a shiny new
 suburban Warsaw office building. Her employer recently banned smoking
 in the office, forcing Ms. Rakowska and her colleagues to brave the
 elements for a cigarette. "This smoking ban is an inconvenience, and it
 could have an influence," she says, tapping her cigarette over a Pall Mall
 ashtray. "It's the fashion to stop smoking," adds a co-worker who is
 huddling with her.

 Fighting Back

 Dr. Zatonski says drug companies' market research indicates that well over
 half of Polish smokers want to quit, far more than in other countries of
 Central Europe and some to the west. That threat is sparking a
 counteroffensive from tobacco companies, which have pushed to get
 warning labels reduced and to delay Poland's adoption of the European
 Union's ban on tobacco advertising. They have also raised personal
 questions about Poland's tobacco opponents.

 "What are really their motives? Self-promotion?" asks Ms. Kozerska at
 BAT. Dr. Zatonski, she says, "is not trying to be balanced. He uses a lot of
 assumptions based on speculation." The Smokers' Protection Society, a
 smokers-rights group in Krakow, regularly issues statements countering
 Dr. Zatonski's comments. "Thanks to our letters [to the Parliamentary
 Health Committee], Prof. Zatonski has started speaking the truth," read a
 recent open letter to members of Parliament.

 "The tobacco industry has attacked me unfairly a few times," says Dr.
 Zatonski with a sigh, but insists his work is based on scientific observation.
 "I certainly don't do this because I hate tobacco. I do this because I love
 people," he adds.

 Dr. Zatonski says his work even sparked a personal conversion. "I
 completely changed my health behavior," notes the father of five, patting
 the slight middle-age paunch against which he struggles. "Now I exercise
 every day." He even sees room for the world's largest cigarette maker in
 his health-focused mission.

 "We love that Philip Morris is selling healthy things in Poland," he says
 jovially of the company, which is now also one of Poland's larger food
 producers. "I wish they would spend a billion dollars a year selling fat-free
 food in Poland."