[Intl-tobacco] WHO Seeks Global Ban on Tobacco Ads (fwd)

[Robert Weissman]

WHO Seeks Global Ban on Tobacco Ads
by Matthew Pennington / Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, May 31, 2000; 5:53 a.m. EDT

BANGKOK, Thailand =96=96 The World Health Organization launched a global
campaign against the tobacco industry today, accusing the companies of
systematically spreading death almost unchallenged.

The organization said it would make a global ban on tobacco advertising a
priority in an agreement to be negotiated by its 191 members.

Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, director-general of the WHO, marked World
No-Tobacco Day in the Thai capital to pay tribute to activists who won a
nationwide ban on tobacco advertising in 1992.

About 10,000 people demonstrated in central Bangkok, singing anti-tobacco
songs and starting a clock representing one death every eight seconds from
tobacco-related disease.

"Tobacco is a communicable disease. It's communicated through advertising,
marketing and making smoking appear admirable and glamorous," Brundtland
said.

Brundtland accused the tobacco industry of using sports and entertainment
figures to market its products to children and create a new generation of
smokers.

"It is hard, if not impossible, to find any parallel in history where
people who have gone about in such a systematic way perpetuating death and
destruction have gone unpunished and unquestioned," said Brundtland, a
former prime minister of Norway.

Brundtland said 10 million people a year will die from tobacco-related
deaths by 2030, more than 70 percent of them from the developing world, an
increasingly important market for tobacco companies. Currently, the figure
is 3.5 million to 4 million.

David Wilson, regional manager of corporate affairs for British-American
Tobacco, which has a 15 percent share of the global cigarette market,
denied on Tuesday that children are targeted.

Wilson also complained that the industry was being "locked out" of
negotiations on the planned Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which
will consider the global advertising ban.

Brundtland said tobacco companies would be given the chance to put their
case across to the WHO in Geneva in October.

According to the WHO, about 1.15 billion of the world's 6 billion-plus
people are smokers.

China, the world's biggest tobacco producer and consumer, will draw up a
national tobacco-control plan to reduce smoking-related health problems
and economic losses, the state-run Beijing Morning Post said today.

Brundtland praised Thailand for responding "forcibly" 10 years ago when it
came under pressure to open its markets to foreign tobacco. Thailand
eventually was forced to open to foreign imports, but the spat created
momentum for the anti-tobacco campaign.

Health Minister Korn Dabbaransi said Thailand's action had left it "the
loser in trade, but the winner in health."