Fighting the tobacco giants - Government should defy lobbyists
International tobacco spent millions, probably billions in today’s terms, to shout down the scientists and doctors who identified their products as killers. They did this knowing that at least one third of their customers would die because of smoking. This cynical rearguard action cost millions of smokers’ lives but because it generated billions in profits and tax revenues it was regarded as acceptable business practice.
The tobacco giants continue to behave in this immoral way in societies where public health authorities are not as assertive or as well-resourced as they are in the West, where ignorance is still their best and last ally. They unashamedly suggest that they are in the free choice business rather than an addiction-creation, life-shortening business where profit is measured in dollars but never balanced with their customers’ premature deaths.
The figures are staggering. Global tobacco production stands somewhere between €525bn and €550bn a year. Philip Morris International had revenues of €25bn in 2012. China is the world’s major producer followed by India, Brazil, and America. Tobacco consumption generates about €130 per capita worldwide in tax each year, the US collects some €12bn in tobacco taxes. These figures, unsurprisingly, wield almost irresistible influence — as most graveyards can attest.
In Irish terms the figures translate into about 7,000 deaths a year, or if you prefer your deaths in smaller slices, an average 583 a month or 135 a week or 19 a day. Deaths from tobacco-related diseases here are 9% above the EU average. Government figures show 90% of lung cancers are caused by smoking and half of smokers will die becasue of smoking.
Against that background it is hard to imagine that tobacco might have many allies, if any, but that is not the case. Taoiseach Enda Kenny has felt the heavy hand of the tobacco giants on his shoulder through German politicians and businesses who have encouraged — and that’s a very benign choice of word — him to scrap plans to impose plain packaging regulations on cigarette companies. Mr Kenny has been told, and this is hardly anything other than a thinly-veiled threat, that any such legislation could threaten our financial recovery.
Mr Kenny got a letter signed by 27 MEPs, 13 of whom are members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party so the threat/advice cannot be easily dismissed with the courage that saw the introduction of tobacco controls in Ireland. It is confirmation though that these measures are working and that tobacco companies fear that they might be replicated across an ever-more health conscious EU.
Mr Kenny, possibly more than any European leader in office, knows what it is to be bullied by Europe’s paymasters. However, our health rather than our economy is at stake this time. Mr Kenny and his Government should press ahead with their plans to make it ever more difficult to sell tobacco in this country and tell the German lobbyists where to get off.
