[Intl-tobacco] Lobby Fought Swiss Curbs on Smoking, Report Says (fwd)

[Robert Weissman]

Lobby Fought Swiss Curbs on Smoking, Report Says
by ELIZABETH OLSON
Source: New York Times, Sunday, 1/14/01

GENEVA, Jan. 13 — Tobacco companies including Philip Morris lobbied
vigorously behind the scenes against measures to tighten laws against
smoking in Switzerland, a country they considered a bellwether of smoking
trends in Europe, a new United Nations study has found.

The report is the first in a series commissioned by the World Health
Organization, which last year publicly criticized the tobacco industry for
using its influence to curb anti-smoking efforts around the world.

The United Nations health agency is pushing its 191 member countries to
agree on a tough international accord to curb smoking, especially among
adolescents.  Smoking kills an estimated 4 million people yearly, a toll
that is expected to more than double over the next decade because of
smoking's increasing popularity in developing countries, where tobacco
companies have been pursuing new markets in part to offset trends against
smoking in the United States.

Using documents released by Philip Morris in connection with litigation in
the United States, the report's authors concluded that the "tobacco
industry made a large, and largely invisible, effort in Switzerland to
prevent implementation of meaningful tobacco control legislation and
policies."

Specifically, the companies cooperated with the restaurant industry to
fight against separate non- smoking areas. They also tried to thwart
efforts to ban smoking on airline flights, trains, at work and in public
places. The industry "has been using the same strategies over and over to
fight science and tobacco-control policies," said the report, written by
Dr. Chung-Yol Lee and Dr. Stanton A. Glantz of the University of
California.

This includes a "well-organized network" that has enabled the
multinationals to "always stay up-to-date and exchange timely information
and tested know-how between countries and regions," they said.

The effort in Switzerland was particularly important to tobacco companies,
many of which base their European headquarters there, and identified in a
1989 tobacco industry study as "a key battleground in Europe."

About one-third of Switzerland's 7 million people smoke, according to the
latest figures. Increased smoking among women and teenagers has offset the
decline among men. Despite Switzerland's high standard of living and
partial dependence on tobacco taxes to support its shrinking federal
pension fund, the country has the lowest tobacco excise tax in Western
Europe.

Specifically, the 128-page report detailed the successful effort to stymie
legislation in the city of Lucerne, a tourist center, to require
non-smoking sections in restaurants. The report said that the tobacco
industry also worked behind the scenes to water down regulations to
restrict smoking in the workplace.

Despite the fact that 10,000 deaths, or about one-sixth of the annual
total, in Switzerland are due to smoking- related diseases, the country
does not have a stringent antitobacco policy. Many companies allow
smoking, and few restaurants provide non- smoking sections.

Smoking is banned in public places but restrictions are not enforced, the
report's authors found. Tobacco advertising and promotion is "virtually
unregulated," according to the report. "There is no meaningful protection
for non-smokers from toxic chemicals in second-hand smoke," in public or
workplaces, the report said.

The researchers also accused the tobacco giants of trying to influence
Swissair's consideration of a ban on smoking during flights — a policy
widely adopted by other carriers — in the mid-1990's. Although tobacco
companies tried to exert pressure through airline attendants — helping to
finance their annual meetings — Swissair banned smoking in 1997.

In 1994, the Swiss railroad system decided against a smoke-free trial on
regional trains. The tobacco industry worked with the system to conduct a
public opinion survey, which found only 30 percent of those polled wanted
no-smoking trains.

Two nationwide votes — in 1979 and 1993 — to ban alcohol and tobacco
advertising also were defeated thanks to an orchestrated campaign by big
tobacco, the researchers concluded.

Philip Morris, which was identified by the researchers as the "driving
force"  behind pro-smoking actions in Switzerland, denied that "any
inferences of improper influences are substantiated" in the report. "As
with any corporation, we seek to make our views known," said Mark Transon,
director of corporate affairs at company headquarters in Lausanne. "There
is nothing improper or abnormal about that."

The report, he said, was based on "documents that are pretty old, and
reflect a polarized environment where there was acrimony between the
tobacco industry and its critics." The atmosphere is different now because
Philip Morris takes "its critics' views into account," he said.