EThe smoking guns / The anti-smoking brigade is up against governmentsaddicted to tobacco taxes, writes Mark Ragg (fwd)

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

The smoking guns / The anti-smoking brigade is up against governments
addicted to tobacco taxes, writes Mark Ragg
by Mark Ragg
Source: Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday, 12/18/99
The smoking guns

This has been a good week for anti-smoking campaigners. They have seen
some of their deepest suspicions about tobacco companies confirmed by the
best possible source - the companies themselves, in their own words.

This has not been a good week for tobacco companies. One of them - British
American Tobacco (BAT) - through its director of corporate and regulatory
affairs, Brendan Brady, simultaneously complained and confirmed that "a
number of the documents [reported in the Herald], particularly those taken
out of context, paint the tobacco industry in a poor light".

Poor light is perhaps a touch gentle. The documents to which Brady was
referring are slowly coming to light after the settlements of cases
between 46 States in the US and eight tobacco organisations last November.
So far, 26 million pages of internal industry documents - many worthless,
but some vitally interesting - have emerged, but only a small proportion
have been indexed and posted on the Internet and scanned for evidence of
the industry's duplicity.

The documents show the web of intrigue and influence surrounding the
tobacco industry in Australia, and the degree to which Australian
activities were directed from head offices in other nations. After all, we
are learning about the Australian industry from documents lodged in US
courts, which have no powers outside the 51 States. Some of our industry's
strategies, memos, legal threats, presentations and speeches have been
sitting in New York head offices for decades.

Working from these documents, this week the Herald revealed that the
Confederation of Australian Sport, which represents 5 million sportspeople
and which lobbied hard for the continued tobacco sponsorship of sport, was
established and partially funded by Philip Morris.

The documents show that Philip Morris funded electoral research "and other
allied matters" for the Liberal Party in 1975, and a Philip Morris
lobbyist felt close enough to the party to describe it as "we".

They show that the Tobacco Institute of Australia, the now disbanded
industry lobby group, secretly agreed to help the Australian Labor Party's
insurance company pay for a court battle over passive smoking with the
former party Federal secretary, David Combe.

The Herald also discovered that Philip Morris pays both the Committee for
Economic Development (CEDA) and The Sydney Institute $10,000 a year,
describing the funding as a "charitable donation". The Sydney Institute's
executive director, Dr Gerard Henderson, has written a number of articles
that put forward positions favoured by the tobacco industry. He has
declined to comment on his institute's payments.

The documents also reveal that WD&HO Wills, now part of BAT, sold over a
12-month period cigarettes which it believed to be contaminated by an
internal saboteur without informing the public or the regulatory
authorities.

Brady believes it is all "a tad tired". So what is the industry up to now?

Well, it's still lobbying. BAT's chairman, Nick Greiner, the former NSW
Liberal premier, reputedly has better access to the Federal Cabinet than
almost anybody.

And BAT is still building connections by appointing fashionmeister Carla
Zampatti to the board, providing the double benefit of an insight into
another industry plus further access to Liberals via her husband, the
former MP and current ambassador to France, John Spender. Zampatti's
appointment coincided with that of Geraldine Paton, former publisher of
The Australian newspaper. Paton's old boss, Rupert Murdoch, sits on the
board of Philip Morris.

And it's still displaying the sort of linguistic dexterity for which it is
renowned. Only this week in its response to the revelations of Philip
Morris's funding of the Liberals in 1975, the company's corporate
communications manager, Nerida Whit, assured the Herald that Philip Morris
"declared all donations as required". What she didn't say was that Philip
Morris did not declare its donation. Under legislation of the time, it
didn't need to.

And it's still avoiding creating safer cigarettes by not reducing nicotine
levels (which would reduce both addictiveness and sales), by not keeping
carcinogenic additives out, by not reducing pesticide use.

And it's still playing for time.

Tobacco sponsorship of sport really picked up in 1976 when broadcast
advertising finished. It took until 1992 for the Federal Government to
start to ban sponsorship of sport which, apart from the highly
cost-effective advertising it brought, contrived a specious link between
sport and smoking. Even so, it will not be until 2006 that tobacco
sponsorship of sport is finally gone from Australia - the date at which
even the Formula One circuit has been forced to give up the gaspers. And
by that time, Greiner will no longer be on the board of SOCOG.

Many of the tobacco industry's strategies are on show most clearly in the
current debate over smoking in hotels and restaurants. The main issue is
whether non-smokers should be exposed to passive smoking and the risks to
health. The tobacco industry has used multiple strategies to get away from
that issue - generalisation, controversy, separation and delay.

Generalisation? It has tried to move passive smoking to an issue of indoor
air quality, even to the point of establishing a chair of indoor air
quality at several American universities. The documents show the tobacco
industry as one of the key forces behind research into, and publicity
about, "sick building syndrome" - the concept that office workers may feel
crook not because people smoke near them, but because the ventilation is
poor.

Controversy? It has played up scientific dispute over the degree of damage
to health from passive smoking, pretending it's a dispute over the
existence of damage to health.

Separation? By pushing for restaurants and hotels to be considered
separately, the tobacco industry has allowed smoking to continue in hotels
for at least another decade, which brings us to delays. The tobacco
industry's prime tactic, when seeking settlement over an issue, is to have
resolution put off. Back in the '70s, the ban on broadcast advertising
took three years to phase in. The ban on sponsorship is taking 14.

The big question is whether these strategies have worked. Simon Chapman,
the chairman of Action on Smoking and Health, argues they haven't. He says
advertising basically doesn't exist in Australia, apart from point of sale
and the cigarette girls, the skinny and underdressed young women who have
reappeared in Sydney pubs and clubs over the past few months, selling $4
packs.

He also argues that the number of smokers has dropped markedly - from more
than 60 per cent of men after the war to about 25 per cent now, with a
lesser decline among women - and that the amount of tobacco we smoke has
also fallen (see figure).

Smokers are often social pariahs, sitting outside not only workplaces but
their own homes to keep puffing.

But you could make a case these strategies have been enormously
successful. By the 1920s, some doctors suspected smoking was dangerous. In
1939, the Nazi physician Franz Muller declared "the extraordinary rise in
tobacco use" was "the single most important cause of the rising incidence
of lung cancer". In 1950, British researchers made the link. In 1962, the
Royal College of Physicians produced a report documenting the dangers of
smoking. In 1964, the US Surgeon-General did the same.

Sixty years after Muller, 37 years after the Royal College of Physicians
and 35 years after the Surgeon-General, governments are addicted to
tobacco taxes. They give 14-year sunset clauses. They wind down their
commitment to public education. They act when pushed.

The balance? Last year the Philip Morris group internationally made an
operating profit of $5.3 billion. In Australia, WD&HO Wills made $44
million and Rothmans made $117 million. Share prices have risen.

While smoking rates in Australia have declined, they have declined far
more among the educated and wealthy. The social gap is widening. Smoking
is becoming associated with poverty and, like anything else tied in with
poverty, will be impossible to eradicate.

But that's the West. In Asia, smoking is booming, absolutely booming. The
global strategy appears to be fairly simple. Survive in the West, where
it's nice to have the head office, and sell like mad in the less regulated
but more populated parts of the world.

The tobacco giants appear set for another few decades of prosperity.