For decades, the tobacco industry has employed devious tactics to keep generations of men, women and children addicted to cigarettes.
For decades, the tobacco industry has employed devious tactics to keep generations of men, women and children addicted to cigarettes.
The industry’s success in undermining and defeating government efforts to control tobacco has led to an epidemic that continues to take 8 million lives each year.
The only way to protect life-saving tobacco control measures is to expose the industry’s tactics and take action to prevent the same tactics being used again.
The tobacco industry spent enormous amounts on disinformation campaigns and propaganda to negate and deflect the science linking smoking to cancer. The tobacco industry gathered health ministers from all Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and Philip Morris distributed briefing papers promoting that:
Philip Morris International’s leaked corporate affairs strategy (2014) reveals the company’s The tobacco industry hired “independent” scientists to support industry studies and question smoke-free policies.
The tobacco industry’s plan for the Middle East involved reversing popular and scientific opinion that secondhand smoke is harmful. It targeted scientific journals and recruited third-party scientists/toxicologists.
The tobacco industry aimed youth smoking prevention programmes at harnessing “positive feelings” for tobacco companies. The programmes were intended to detract policy-makers from taking more effective control measures such as tax increases and advertising bans.
In Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, transnational tobacco companies promoted youth smoking prevention programmes on their websites and actively used this to play on health ministries’ concerns, intending to counter advertising bans.
The tobacco industry publicly denied the addictiveness of nicotine (tobacco executives even swore under oath that nicotine is not addictive) while suppressing and concealing evidence of its addictiveness.
The tobacco industry misled the public to believe that “light” or “mild” products are safer. Light/mild cigarettes were used to leverage on smokers’ health concerns and increase sales.
To appeal to the Islamic community, Brown & Williamson (a subsidiary of British American Tobacco) used the “Light Ramadan” campaign to encourage smokers to “switch to lights”. Meanwhile, Philip Morris insisted on the right to hold promotions during Ramadan as part of its effort to undermine the interpretation of smoking as “haram”.
The tobacco industry consistently claimed that smuggled cigarettes were counterfeits and offered their expertise in government anti-smuggling activities – even when found to be complicit in smuggling.
In the Middle East, “Tobacco transnationals took advantage of weak and unstable governance, and continued to supply the contraband trade despite appeals by the government to cease undermining its revenues”.
The tobacco industry falsely claimed that it was supportive of the WHO FCTC; however, its internal documents called measures compliant with the WHO FCTC “extreme” .
From 2010, Philip Morris and British American Tobacco launched litigation to challenge WHO FCTC-supported policies in Australia, Norway, United Kingdom and Uruguay, and backed the stalling of plain packaging policies at the World Trade Organization.
The tobacco industry announced to the public that it had “transformed” and was now committed to “a smoke-free world”, by allegedly encouraging smokers to quit by switching to ENDS and HTPs. Meanwhile, the industry continued to aggressively market cigarettes in ways attractive to children and to promote cigarette sales/ profits.
Philip Morris used a US$ 960 million investment distributed over 12 years to establish the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, “to put an end to smoking due to the harms and deaths caused.” However, it also announced to investors that sales of cigarettes would remain its core business.