[Intl-tobacco] Norway Anti-Smoke Campaign Targets Tobacco Giants

[Robert Weissman]

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=healthNews&storyID=3685942

Norway Anti-Smoke Campaign Targets Tobacco Giants
Fri October 24, 2003 12:03 PM ET
By Alister Doyle

OSLO (Reuters) - Norway portrayed tobacco giants as
cynically damaging public health on Friday in an
anti-cigarette campaign by the Nordic nation that has some
of the world's most draconian anti-smoking laws.

Three new television advertisements to be aired in Norway,
and to be offered free abroad, show shadowy cigarette
company executives in dark suits discussing additives like
ammonia to help raise the addictiveness of their products.

"Every time you buy a new pack you sponsor an industry that
will damage your health," it says with flashbacks to the
heads of seven U.S. tobacco firms wrongly telling a U.S. congressional
committee in 1994 that nicotine is not addictive.

"You have to do what they fear most. Stop buying their products," the
advertisements conclude.

Earlier this year, Norway's parliament was the first to agree a
nationwide ban on smoking in all restaurants and
bars, copying bans in some U.S. and Canadian states and cities.

The Norwegian ban will start only in mid-2004, after a similar planned
ban in Ireland from January.

"I believe we are at a tipping point in the fight against tobacco," said
Norwegian Health Minister Dagfinn Hoybraaten.
But he said that Oslo had no plans to follow up the campaign, for
instance by suing cigarette companies.

Cigarettes in Norway cost 68 Norwegian crowns ($9.70)
per pack of 20, among the highest prices in the world.
Even so, about 26 percent of Norwegians smoke daily, a
higher rate than in many other western nations.

"One of two smokers will die of their habit," Gro Harlem
Brundtland, a former Norwegian prime minister who
stepped down as head of the World Health Organization
this year, told a news conference with Hoybraaten calling
tobacco an epidemic.

($1=7.009 Norwegian Crown)