Promoting Legal Murder

According to the World Health Organization, "100 million deaths were caused by tobacco in the 20th century. If current trends continue, there will be up to one billion deaths in the 21st century."

Recognizing the tobacco industry’s role in causing the tobacco epidemic and its long history of deception, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), requires its parties to guard against tobacco industry interference and protect tobacco control policies from the commercial and other vested interests of the industry.

 In addition, the public and politicians are increasingly unsympathetic to the industry’s demands. In response, tobacco companies have sought to use influential third parties to oppose strong tobacco control measures around the world. A key ally of tobacco companies in these efforts is the U.S. Chamber and its global network of American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) affiliates. Although the U.S. Chamber does not publicly disclose its membership list, the U.S. Chamber’s board of directors includes Altria Group, the largest tobacco company operating in the United States and the former parent company of Philip Morris International (PMI). Additionally, multinational tobacco companies such as PMI, British American Tobacco (BAT), Japan Tobacco International (JTI) and Imperial Tobacco hold memberships in more than 55 AmCham chapters. 

"The U.S. Chamber and its AmCham affiliates have joined the tobacco industry in fighting effective tobacco control policies in multiple countries—often without fully disclosing that they are working with the tobacco industry—implying that the full force of the U.S. business community is behind these efforts and that economic harm could result if countries move forward," states a report by Tobacco Free Kids, Public Citizen, Corporate Accountability International, and other watchdog groups, called Blowing Smokefor Big Tobacco (pdf)

For example, Burkina Faso passed a law in 2011 requiring graphic warning labels to cover at least 60 percent of packaging for tobacco products. Yet, this mandate has been delayed for years by the tobacco industry and Chamber of Commerce.

"In January 2014, Prime Minister Luc Adolphe Tiao received a letter from the U.S. Chamber warning that the Minister of Health's graphic warning label proposal violated international intellectual property rights and trade agreements, implying that the tobacco industry might use international trade agreements to entangle the Burkina Faso proposal in costly trade litigation, which as a low-income country it cannot afford," the report states.

In 2013, the president of Uruguay submitted a proposal to the Senate to ban tobacco product displays at points-of-sale. In April 2014, the president of the U.S. Chamber wrote to the president of Uruguay’s Senate, stating that the proposed ban would violate the World Trade Organization Agreementon Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property and make it difficult for “consumers, who may have less readily available information to make educated choices among different brands.” The letter further argued that a full display ban would create a slippery slope that would lead to overly restrictive bans on other products and increase illicit trade of tobacco products, which would fund organized crime and terrorism. Despite pressure from the industry and its allies, the Uruguayan General Assembly passed the ban on tobacco product displays at the point-of-sale in July 2014.

In 2012, cigarette prices in the Philippines were among the lowest in the world. Article 6 of the FCTC provides for the use of taxation and pricing policies on tobacco products to decrease the demand for tobacco. Evidence and experience from around the world conclusively show that increasing the price of cigarettes by raising tobacco taxes increases government revenue even as tobacco consumption declines. Consequently, the tobacco industry consistently opposes tax increases designed to reduce consumption.144 In the Philippines, the U.S. Chamber and the AmCham in the Philippines aggressively fought an effort by legislators to reduce tobacco consumption by raising taxes on cigarettes. The U.S. Chamber stated that “exorbitant tax increases on tobacco products will stimulate persistent and corrosive growth in smuggling and other illicit trades, which only fuels organized criminal activity and its consequences.” The U.S. Chamber’s arguments mirrored those made directly by tobacco companies. In December 2014, commissioner of the Bureau of Internal Revenue Kim Hernares confirmed that higher-than-expected revenues refuted claims by the tobacco industry that the government would fail to reach its revenue targets and lose substantial revenues through illicit trade.

In 2013, the Republic of Moldova began developing amendments to strengthen the country’s tobacco control law. As proposed, the draft amendments call for improved provisions to fully ban smoking in indoor public places; require graphic warning labels to cover 65 percent of packs; comprehensively ban tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship; ban the sale of smokeless tobacco products and slim cigarettes; and include measures to prevent tobacco industry interference in setting and implementing policy. Although the prime minister of Moldova approved a bill with these provisions in 2013 and submitted the draft for final parliamentary approval, the U.S. Chamber and the AmCham in Moldova have led a two-year campaign to delay and weaken the proposed legislation. Local tobacco control advocates report that the AmCham consistently pressured government officials and actively lobbied legislators throughout the drafting and legislative process in order to weaken the bill. Additionally, in February 2014, the president of the U.S. Chamber sent a letter to the president of Moldova’s Parliament warning that many of the proposed amendments were not evidence-based, ignored regulatory procedures and violated Moldova’s international trade obligations.

Nor has it been the smaller countries that have had their tobacco laws challenged. The EU and the UK have been threatened by the lobbyists, activities that served the tobacco industry’s objectives of significantly weakening legislation. 

Contrary to the U.S. Chamber’s claims, to date more than 70 countries and territories have mandated graphic health warnings labels covering 50 percent or more of the product package without being found in violation of international trade agreements or intellectual property rights.

"From Ukraine to Uruguay, Moldova to the Philippines, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its foreign affiliates have become the hammer for the tobacco industry, engaging in a worldwide effort to fight antismoking laws of all kinds, according to interviews with government ministers, lobbyists, lawmakers and public health groups in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States," wrote New York Times reporter Danny Hakim.

Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division, which runs U.S. Chamber Watch, told Common Dreams that the power of the Chamber and tobacco industry could grow with mammoth corporate deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership: "One of the reasons that so many folks are concerned about trade deals is the lack of transparency and the way they so obviously put corporate interests ahead. Big Tobacco is part of that problem."

From here

The Killing Industry

The tobacco industry has been accused of “appalling hypocrisy”, amid claims that it is fuelling the illicit trade in cigarette smuggling to bolster its arguments against tax increases and other anti-smoking measures. In a report published to coincide with World No Tobacco Day, the pressure group ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) claimed that some tobacco companies are flooding foreign markets with more products than there is demand. The report said that when some of this tobacco is subsequently smuggled back to the UK, it enables the companies to point to the dangers of a burgeoning contraband trade and to say that measures such as increasing tax would only serve to make legitimate cigarettes more expensive.

The World Health Organisation claimed: “The tobacco industry covertly and overtly supports the illegal trade, from providing products to the market, to working to block tobacco control by trying to convince governments that measures like health warnings or tax increases will lead to more illicit trade.”

Suspicions about oversupplying foreign markets to stimulate a return trade in smuggling to the UK have been raised by organisations including HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), which has reported that the 2011 supply of some brands of rolling tobacco to some countries exceeded legitimate demand by 240 per cent. In November, British American Tobacco was fined £650,000 by HMRC for oversupplying cigarettes to Belgium, although the company insisted it was “providing a perfectly legal supply to a legitimate demand” and announced its intention to challenge the fine in court.

Meanwhile, Employment minister, Priti Patel, was once part of a team of spindoctors paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to help a tobacco giant counter negative publicity. Patel’s job was to lobby MEPs against the introduction of the EU tobacco control directive, which was introduced shortly after the new millennium. She was charged with ensuring that a letter from the BAT chairman at the time, Martin Broughton, outlining his objection to the directive, was faxed to every MEP. BAT was charged £165 an hour for Patel’s services.

In addition to her work lobbying MEPs, Patel’s team played a key role in fashioning the company’s public profile. In a memo dated 14 December 2000, a senior executive within the company, Andreas Vecchiet, conducted an annual appraisal of the Shandwick team’s performance. “We have mainly used Shandwick for project-based work relating to the WHO [World Health Organisation] campaign, NGO monitoring … reputation issues relating to Burma, and some limited advice relating to Nigeria and labour standards.”

BAT’s position in Burma at the turn of the millennium was hugely controversial. “BAT’s factory in Burma was jointly owned with the military dictatorship and so helped fund one of the most brutal military dictatorships in the world,” said Anna Roberts, executive director at Burma Campaign UK. “BAT refused to admit how much money it gave to the dictatorship, but Burma Campaign UK estimated that BAT paid the generals $16m (£10m) in taxes alone between 1999 and 2002. In contrast, BAT paid its factory workers in Burma just £15 a month. The dictatorship spent 40% of its budget on the military.”

Big Business, Big Money, Big Blackmail

Smoking is the biggest preventable cause of death in England, killing 80,000 people every year. 

British American Tobacco and Philip Morris filed legal objections at the High Court in London. Another company, Imperial Tobacco, said in March that it intended to challenge the law in the UK courts. Japan Tobacco International (JTI), which owns the Winston, Camel and Benson & Hedges brands, also intends to take the government to court.

They claim that the new rules are illegal because they take away their trademark intellectual property. British American Tobacco and Philip Morris say that stopping them from using their trademarks goes against English and EU property law. They also argue that the plain packaging law prevents the free movement of goods. According to Philip Morris, the UK's law should have been postponed until the European Court of Justice had reached its decision on the matter.

Health charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), said it had commissioned legal advice that indicates the legislation is compatible with European law. The group’s chief executive Deborah Arnott said: 

“The tobacco industry knows it has little or no chance of winning but by threatening legal action it is trying to stop the infection spreading to other countries. Standardised plain packaging threatens the profitability of the industry and they are desperate to prevent other countries from following the example set by Australia, the UK and Ireland.”

Profits and Lies

Action on Consumer Choice (ACC) is closely modelled on the Centre for Consumer Freedom (CCF) in the USA,  a hugely powerful organisation funded by tobacco firms and fast food chains that was the brainchild of Richard Berman, one of Washington’s most successful lobbyists. . Tobacco companies are backing the new organisation that launches this week to push the message that drinkers and fast food fans will be the next targets of health campaigners if smokers’ freedoms are not protected.

Simon Clark of Freedom of the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (Forest), the tobacco-funded body behind the ACC, notes on his blog “I can’t think of a better model than Rick Berman’s Centre for Consumer Freedom.”

 Berman has argued against an initiative to lower the blood alcohol content limit for US drivers, claiming that stricter limits would punish those who drink responsibly.  Berman told leading oil and gas executives that they must be “prepared to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities”. He continued: “Think of this as an endless war. And you have to budget for it.”

 “Action on Consumer Choice appears to be the latest front group set up by the tobacco industry to confuse the public,” said Professor Anna Gilmore of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath.

Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), said she doubted whether the ACC would be able to attract anything other than tobacco companies. “It would be crazy for food or drinks companies to jump into bed with the tobacco industry. It would wreck their reputations and completely undermine any arguments they want to make against future regulation.”

The concept of a business whose profits depend on the sale of cancer-inducing drugs is repellent. The idea that capitalists are cynically engaging in a business for their own short-term gain at the expense of others’ health is an obscenity. It is a condemnation of capitalist society that the tobacco industry are not alone in that death is their trade, such as the armament industry. But two wrongs don’t make a right.

A Sick Future

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs), often known as chronic diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, asthma and other lung and respiratory diseases are the leading cause of death world-wide each year, causing 36 million deaths in 2008 and accounting for 63 percent of all deaths, 80 percent of them in poor nations where prevention programs are virtually non-existent and access to diagnosis and treatment is very limited. Experts say that over the next 20 years, this epidemic is projected to accelerate and that by 2030, the number of deaths from NCDs could reach 52 million a year. NCDs also account for half of all global disability, including blindness and amputations. Preventing these deaths -- or at least a good proportion of them -- isn't rocket science. Proven measures such as reducing smoking rates, improving diets, making simple drugs available and boosting exercise could knock a huge hole in that figure. Stopping a billion people from lighting up every day or providing cheap drugs like aspirin and statins to prevent heart attacks and strokes may be cost effective, but the payback won't be quick and it is unlikely to win many votes.

"The time horizon for the return on that investment is very long and beyond many political horizons. So it's difficult to get people to commit to these kinds of resources" says Gordon Tomaselli, president of the American Heart Association.

Ten years after committing to fight AIDS, the United Nations is taking on common chronic diseases -- in what is shaping up to be a bruising battle between big business, Western governments and the world's poor. Tobacco, food and drinks companies are in the firing line for peddling products linked to cancer, diabetes and heart disease, while politicians in the rich world are accused of failing to set firm targets or provide funds to tackle the problems. The fear is that big business has successfully lobbied rich governments to be only half-hearted in battling non-communicable diseases, or NCDs, despite predictions that they could cripple healthcare systems of developing countries.

"This is a once in a generation opportunity. We could save millions of lives here, and it's shameful and immoral that industry lobbying has put short-term profits in front of a public health disaster," Rebecca Perl of the World Lung Foundation (WLF) told Reuters. WLF has been involved in preliminary talks for several months. According to those close to the negotiations, a draft version of the political declaration that will form the cornerstone of the U.N.'s thinking on NCDs contains many platitudes but few tangible commitments.

World Health Organization director general Margaret Chan has described tobacco as "an industry that has much money and no qualms about using it in the most devious ways imaginable." With tobacco predicted to kill more than a billion people this century, if current trends persist, the public health lobby says if the U.N. meeting does nothing else, it should at least make a smoke-free world one of its central targets. Smoking alone causes one in three cases of lung disease, one in four cases of cancer, and one in 10 cases of heart disease. Japan Tobacco, for example, is 50 percent owned by the Japanese government, and the massive profits of U.S. cigarette makers bolster the U.S. economy. In China, home to a third of the world's male smokers, the combination of taxes and sales from China National Tobacco -- a wholly state-owned entity -- account for around 9 percent of the government's annual fiscal revenues.
Jaakko Tuomilehto, an epidemiologist at the University of Helsinki says "It's a crazy thing to have a product in the shops that kills every second consumer -- it's madness."

Boyd Swinburn, Professor and director, WHO Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention at Deakin University writes.
"Later this month the UN General Assembly will hold a high level meeting on global action on non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer, which are responsible for two-thirds of deaths worldwide. They will release an agreed declaration that is meant to pave the way to reducing the number of premature deaths from non-communicable diseases – or NCDs - the vast majority of which take place in poorer countries. Yet, despite this enormous burden, the governments of the rich countries are joining forces with tobacco, food, alcohol and pharmaceutical corporations to water down commitments that might flow from this meeting.

WHO and public interest groups hoped that agreements on targets and commitments would provide the boost to mobilisation on NCDs that a similar UN meeting achieved for HIV/AIDS a decade ago. This turned out to be a rather naive and optimistic hope. Since the proposed policies include smoke-free environments, restrictions on food marketing to children, increased alcohol tax and the promotion of generic medicines those multinational businesses see them as a threat to the sales of their products, and, as experience has shown, they do not take that threat lightly. (In Europe the food industry spent €1 billion opposing proposals for front-of-pack ''traffic light'' labels on their products.)

The rich countries, particularly the US and EU but also Australia, Canada and New Zealand, are active accomplices in watering down the draft UN statements.

Take for example a clause in earlier documents that related to what it calls the ''development and implementation of cost-effective ways to reduce saturated, transfats, salt and sugar in foods by discouraging the production and marketing of unhealthy foods''. With the help of Australia, Canada and US, that clause is now destined to be excised from the final document. A statement with commitments to tangible outcomes has long been tossed aside and been replaced with a much weaker political statement with all targets and accountability mechanisms removed."

Another unaddressed health problem

Every year, 13 diseases that affect a fifth of the world’s population are responsible for the loss of 56.6 million disability-adjusted life years and 534,000 deaths. But because these diseases only afflict the world’s most impoverished and powerless people, the international community has forgotten about them. Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are a group of parasitic worm and bacterial infections that together represent a huge disease burden. The seven most common NTDs are ascariasis, hookworm, trichuriasis, elephantiasis, river blindness, schistosomiasis, and trachoma. A 50 cent integrated package of rapid-impact medications has the ability to safely obliterate these seven diseases. Cheap therapeutics are available for other NTDs as well, but there is little funding for implementation.

Unlike HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) do not typically kill on their own, but they do lead to massive debility and poverty. Several NTDs also have the ability to either increase susceptibility to or worsen the course of the “big three” diseases — AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. Also unlike AIDS, NTDs lack a vocal afflicted but wealthy population to advocate for treatment. Many NTDs are ancient diseases that no longer threaten the developed world. NTDs are largely neglected by the media and donors because they have a lower death percentage, said Dr. Edward T. Ryan, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Tropical Medicine program. “To a large extent, these are chronic diseases that disproportionately affect the most impoverished on the globe,” Ryan said. “They are often not on the radar screen of health funding agencies.”

Women with female genital schistosomiasis, a disease caused by the parasitic blood-fluke (schistosome) contracted by contact with contaminated freshwater, acquire problems ranging from infertility, to bladder cancer, to anemia and stunted growth in children. In addition, women also develop genital ulcers, and thus become much more vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV. A World Health Organization (WHO) working group concluded that there is a possible link between female genital schistosomiasis and HIV acquisition. “This is one of the biggest underlying reasons for HIV” said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute and a leading global health expert. With as many as 45 million women infected with genital schistosomiasis, eradicating schistosomiasis has major implications for halting the spread of HIV as well. A person with an NTD caused by a parasitic worm infection has a greater chance of contracting tuberculosis, and this chance increases with the number of infections. Co-infection of hookworm and malaria causes severe anemia in children and pregnant women, and this contributes to almost half of all deaths due to malaria.

“For relatively small investments,” Ryan added, “major scourges of humanity can be addressed. In terms of cost-effectiveness, a number of experts would say this is very cost effective for the global community.”

SOYMB understands that the demand for a healthier society to be in effect a revolutionary demand, since health-damaging aspects of production cannot be removed in response to political reform.

capitalist cigarettes

We read in the Independent on Sunday that after more than half a century after scientists uncovered the link between smoking and cancer the tobacco business is still thriving. Despite the known catastrophic effects on health of smoking, profits from tobacco continue to soar. In 2010, the big four tobacco companies – Philip Morris International, British American Tobacco, Japan Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco – made more than £27bn profit, up from £26bn in 2009. And sales of cigarettes have increased: they have risen from 5,000 billion a year in the 1990s to 5,900 billion a year in 2009. They now kill more people annually than alcohol, Aids, car accidents, illegal drugs, murders and suicides combined. The price of their profits will be measured in human lives. In the 20th century, some 100 million people were killed by tobacco use. If current trends continue, tobacco will kill a billion people in the 21st century.

Anna Gilmore, professor of public health at the University of Bath, said: "What most people don't realise is that, although sales are falling in the West, industry profits are increasing. These companies remain some of the most profitable in the world. This is thanks in part to their endless inventive ways of undermining and circumventing regulation. They're trying to reinvent their image to ingratiate themselves with governments, but behind the scenes it's business as usual."

Tobacco firms have pushed the average price of cigarettes up in rich countries such as Britain – where 20 cigarettes now cost more than £6 a pack. Although around 77 per cent of the price of a pack is tax, the amount charged by tobacco companies has also increased. The Office of Fair Trading last year found that a dozen tobacco manufacturers and retailers in the UK had colluded in price fixing, ensuring that packs remained at higher prices to maximise profits. The largest fine was one of £115m for Imperial Tobacco, makers of Lambert & Butler and Golden Virginia. The fine made a minimal dent in its profits for 2010, which topped £4.39bn.

Meanwhile in Malawi, where tobacco farming is heavily relied upon for the economy, the country's anti-corruption bureau has accused tobacco companies of colluding to keep prices paid to farmers for the raw product low - a kilo of leaves plummeted from an average of £1.06 per kg in April 2009 to 47p per kg this year. The knock-on effect of this on farms is near-slave wages for workers and a temptation to use cheap (or free) child labour. (see Socialist Standard article here)

Although 172 countries have signed up to the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control since it was produced six years ago, 20 per cent of them have still done nothing at all to implement its recommendations.

Dr Armando Peruga, programme manager for the WHO's tobacco free initiative, said: "We need to do more. We need to stop the tobacco industry promoting themselves as normal corporate citizens when they are killing people every day. We are lagging behind in establishing comprehensive bans on advertising, marketing, promotion and sponsorship."

But the cigarette capitalists are not bad people, we are assured. Yet they are capitalists and, as such, in search of profit and ready to reach for it wherever its source. They are not just human beings ; they are part of an economic category, driven without semblance of humanity to perform a function. Tobacco may bring lingering death but must not be hindered in any way that might interfere with mounting profits. Capitalism stinks. It stinks of corpses. Millions coughing out their final days, gasping for breath, dying of lung cancer from tobacco

The Cancer of Capitalism

According to World Health Organisation, there are more than one billion smokers worldwide today, and 200 million of them are women. In half of the 151 countries where surveys have been done on tobacco use among young people, there are nearly as many girls as boys smoking cigarettes. An estimated eight million people could die from tobacco use by 2030, including 2.5 million women with three quarters of them from poor countries.

WHO chief Margaret Chan has criticised the attitude of the tobacco industry as "ruthless" and "insidious" in its pursuit of markets in developing countries. Advertisements telling smokers they are smarter, more energetic and better lovers than their non-smoking counterparts are a familiar sight across Bangladesh. One ad said that "if a lady smokes, her baby will be smaller and it will be easier to deliver, the labour will be less painful".

The World Health Organisation warns that tobacco companies are targeting women in developing countries as a new growth market. In Bangladesh 43 percent of the adult population - or 41 million people - use tobacco in some form, up from 37 percent in 2004.The country fits a pattern emerging across the region of rising rates of female tobacco use, particularly in Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Cambodia.It's a trend "...tobacco companies are encouraging ..., viewing women in developing countries as their largest unexploited market ", according to the WHO

"As the number of smokers has declined in the rich countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the tobacco industry has to look to new horizons to market their products... to look for greener pasture...The tobacco industry is like a mutant virus" said Douglas Bettcher, a World Health Organisation expert

A sane society would attempt to tackle the problem now, freed from the constraints of profit and the domination of vested interests. But as we live in a far from sane society it is patently not going to happen. A survey of British medical specialists found that they ranked nicotine higher in the addiction stakes than even heroin. Tobacco actually kills far more people in the world than hard drugs like heroin and cocaine put together. Yet the same newspapers that scream about Britain's sink council housing estates with their heroin junkies, carry on accepting double-page adverts from the tobacco multinationals. Capitalism is a system with no real regard for the health of the mass of the population.The capitalist market is an economy where people really do make money from legalised murder.

Bash the Ash

Tobacco kills more than 5 million people a year from cardiovascular disease, cancers, diabetes and other chronic illnesses, including about 600,000 from second-hand smoke, according to the World Health Organisation .

Developing countries are the new frontier for tobacco companies, which often target women and girls, and smoking rates remain high among poor people in affluent countries, it said. Many of the developing countries have little or no medical care to cope with the health consequences for smokers. Just slightly more than 5 percent of the world's population is protected by national smoke-free laws.Fewer than one third of treaty members restrict advertising, promotion and sponsorship of tobacco products.

"As we all know, the tobacco industry is ruthless, devious, rich and powerful" Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO director-general told a meeting "...If Big Tobacco is in retreat in some parts of the world, it is on the march in others"

Corporate Accountability International said in a statement."Big Tobacco promotes its addictive and deadly product to kids with images like Philip Morris's Marlboro Man, by sponsoring rock concerts and sporting events, and by putting tobacco brand names and logos on everything from T-shirts to patio umbrellas,"