Feature

Tobacco companies: a cancer in our midst

Britain must be forced to end its ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with the tobacco producers if a real attempt is to be made to reduce smoking, says Frank Chalmers

Britain was left looking like the fag end of Europe earlier this summer when our government’s lone stand against compulsory, strong worded health warnings on cigarette packets was unceremoniously stubbed out by the EC. Health Secretary Kenneth Clarke, determinedly backed by Mrs Thatcher, had successfully argued that Britain’s ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with the tobacco multinationals was preferable to a joint approach with the other EC member states.

Up to the present, the UK agreement has resulted in insignificant, side-of-packet warnings that smoking ‘can’ cause cancer, bronchitis and other chest diseases.

This is despite smoking being the biggest single cause of death in middle aged people in Britain, and increasing evidence of the risk to non-smokers of ‘passive smoking’.

What is needed is an explicit and comprehensive government strategy. But as the old song says, ‘Smoke gets in your eyes’, or perhaps in the case of the government the £5.7bn the Treasury gets each year from cigarette taxation gets in its eyes.

The EC ruling — that strongly worded warnings should be placed on the fronts and backs of all cigarette packs, and the tar and nicotine levels should be shown — is a positive development, but it should not be the last word on the matter.

Health ministers from Belgium, France, Italy, Norway and Spain, for example, recently declared their governments’ intention to consider increasing taxes on tobacco, banning smoking in all public transport and in workplaces, and banning cigarette advertising. Switzerland and the Gulf states already ban advertising and Singapore has imposed nicotine and tar limits for cigarettes.

But while our government would do well to adopt many of these ideas, restrictions and bans on their own will not be sufficient to develop the kind of culture necessary to discourage young people from starting to smoke.

The psychology of smoking is complex. In Britain, for example, where smoking among young males has been on the decline, the same trend has not been evident among young women.

The health-warning approach can actually offer an enticing element of risk for young people, in the face of which smoking may represent a relatively cheap and instant means of self assertion and of giving the old ‘twos up’ to a disapproving society.

Reliance on health warnings also places responsibility for withstanding powerful advertisement and peer-group pressure squarely on the shoulders of the individual.

Restricting the ‘glossy and successful’ images of smokers portrayed in cigarette advertising — for which tobacco companies pay millions of pounds — need to be accompanied by the promotion of positive images for non- smoking.

From October, the Canadian government — which has the aim of eliminating smoking in Canada by the year 2000 — will be insisting that all tobacco products devote 30 per cent of their packaging to health warnings. Packaging must also carry an ingredients-disclosure statement and from 1991 all outdoor advertising of tobacco products will be illegal.

Attempts have also been made in Canada to end the link between tobacco and ‘attractive’ images such as sport. Sponsorship of sports events by cigarette brand names have been banned, but the tobacco multinationals have side-stepped this by forming new companies named after their brands — so they can climate be sponsoring events using ‘corporate’ names.

These same ‘gentleman’ of the industry have also turned their corporate might to the less developed countries. Africa and the far east are currently realising massive profits.

According to medical researchers, 85 per cent of lung cancer is caused by smoking, and whether in Britain, Canada or the third world, smokers are more likely to develop cancer of the lips, mouth, tongue, throat, pancreas and urinary tract.

Smoking is an international concern throughout the world counties are struggling to clean their collective lungs. The problem is not so much the individual smoker as the multinational manufacturer. Kenneth Clarke should be told that the day of the ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with the tobacco companies is over. They are the health problem, they are the ones that require a health warning.