U.N. Kicks Off Anti-Smoking Drive/World Health Organization MimicsCalifornia Initiative (fwd)

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

U.N. Kicks Off Anti-Smoking Drive/World Health Organization Mimics
California Initiative
by Colum Lynch/Special to The Washington Post
Source: The Washington Post, Thursday, 11/4/99

Thursday, November 4, 1999; Page A29

UNITED NATIONS—Joe Camel has changed his name to Jose and moved to Mexico.
The Marlboro Man is riding into sunsets from Poland to rural China. But as
the tobacco industry ratchets up its advertising overseas, the World
Health Organization is launching a global counteroffensive.

Borrowing from California's aggressive anti-smoking efforts, the U.N.
agency has produced satirical advertisements in six languages for use in
191 countries. They include a poster of two Marlboro Man look-a-likes on
horseback. "Bob, I've got cancer," one rugged cowboy confides to the
other.

The Geneva-based WHO will gather public health officials and broadcasters
from 14 countries in Lake Tahoe, Calif., today to draw lessons and
inspiration from their counterparts at the California Department of Health
Services.

Drawing on a $1.5 million grant by the United Nations Foundation, a
charity established by a $1 billion pledge from CNN founder Ted Turner,
the WHO also plans to promote international regulation of the tobacco
industry and to press for excise taxes on cigarettes in foreign countries.

While the number of smokers in the United States has dropped from 40
percent of all adults in 1964 to 23 percent in 1997, the number of smokers
in developing countries has been growing at an annual rate of 3.4 percent,
according to the WHO.

Earlier this year, WHO's director, Gro Harlem Brundtland, invited
representatives of more than 100 countries to begin negotiations on a
treaty to control the use of tobacco. The agency estimates that 4 million
people die annually from tobacco-related illnesses, including 1 million in
China and as many as 700,000 in India. At the current rate of growth, the
organization predicts, more than 10 million people will smoke themselves
to death each year by 2030, 70 percent of them in the Third World.

"The consequence of the enormous gains [of anti-smoking efforts] in the
United States is that tobacco companies have to make up for lost revenues
domestically by looking to international markets," said Derek Yach, a
South African epidemiologist who heads WHO's anti-tobacco initiative.

Elizabeth Cho, a spokeswoman for Philip Morris International, said the
portrayal of the American tobacco industry as a global predator is unfair,
because cigarettes have been a part of life in the developing world for
many years. And she noted that some developing countries--such as
Thailand, which bans all smoking advertisements--have stricter regulations
than the United States.

Yach said the United Nations will tailor its campaign to conform with
cultural sensitivities. A poster of a cowboy with a limp cigarette and a
warning that tobacco use can cause impotence, for example, might be
appropriate in Asia but not in the conservative Middle East, he said.

"Things we would never tolerate are commonplace in foreign countries,"
said Colleen Stevens of the tobacco control section at California's
Department of Health Services. "Here, people worry when they see kids
buying cigarettes. In other countries they are allowed to sell them."