Call to monitor tobacco trade

Leading UK public health campaigners have called for international monitoring to combat the growing threat posed by smuggling and contraband tobacco.

In February, documents belonging to British American Tobacco (BAT), the world’s second biggest cigarette manufacturer, suggested the company had been implicated in smuggling where countries had sought to block the inflow of cigarettes through high taxation or import bans.

Donald Reid, spokesperson for the national public health organisation UKPHA, said: ‘We need a monitoring and policing body to track the movement of cigarettes. It is no longer enough to leave the responsibility to individual states and hope for the best.’

The establishment of a monitoring force was also supported by Amanda Sandford, spokesperson for campaign group ASH. ‘I’m not aware of any coordinated monitoring through Interpol or other bodies at an international level,’ she commented. ‘If anything can be done it should be done.’

Steve Woodward, tobacco programme manager at the Health Education Authority, said Britain had the expertise to establish its own monitoring force and that no time should be lost in waiting for international collaboration to be agreed.

‘The British record of investigation and inquiry, when unfettered, is world class and there is no reason why Britain should wait for a partner before setting such an initiative in motion,’ he said.

According to a World Bank report, tobacco taxation has proved to be one of the most successful weapons in discouraging young people from taking up smoking and in reducing demand for tobacco in low- and medium-income countries.

Smuggling undermines attempts to halt the proliferation of cigarette smoking and seriously weakens the possibility of national governments using tobacco taxes to fund healthcare for people suffering the consequences of cigarette use.

Former Conservative chancellor Kenneth Clarke, deputy chair of BAT, defended the company’s actions, saying it ‘faced a dilemma’, because smokers switch to other brands and counterfeiters cash in if supplies are restricted.

‘When any government is unwilling to act or their efforts are unsuccessful, we act completely within the law, on the basis that our brands will be available alongside those of our competitors in the smuggled as well as the legitimate market,’ he said.

Ms Sandford said that ASH had called on the Department of Trade and Industry to investigate the allegations against BAT.

She also pointed out that the World Health Organisation is currently discussing an internationally binding Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which will include a smuggling protocol and increased penalties against smugglers. But negotiations on the WHO framework are not due to reconvene until October.

WHO figures for 1996 suggest that as much as one third of total world cigarette production is diverted into contraband sales. Smuggled cigarettes are said to be responsible for more than 25 per cent of cigarette consumption in Britain.

Frank Chalmers

Dirty tricks from a dirty trade

The recent smuggling allegations levelled against BAT represent only the tip of the iceberg of tobacco companies’ attempts to overcome democratic limits placed on their trade.

In 1998, member companies of the RJR Reynolds tobacco company pleaded guilty in a US court to charges related to smuggling cigarettes across the Canadian/US border and were fined $15m.

According to US-based corporate watchdog INFACT, the tobacco industry giant Philip Morris has considered a detailed action plan including ‘countermeasures to contain/neutralise/re-orient the WHO’ and develop ‘specific strategies and plans to blunt their programme initiatives’.

In India, cigarette manufacturers have been targeting children as young as 12 to increase their pool of adults who smoke, the WHO recently heard.

And in the UK, documents shown to a Commons’ select committee indicate that tobacco company Gallaher considered the possibility of smear campaigns being launched against former public health minister Tessa Jowell and Richard Branson. Jowell and Branson were prominent in the campaign to ban cigarette advertising.

Other proposals considered by Gallaher included the erection of billboards on foreign embassies in the UK, as they are outside UK jurisdiction, and the launching of a pirate radio station in international waters to allow the broadcast of cigarette advertising.

A company spokesperson dismissed the proposals as the results of a brainstorming session that were unlikely to be put into practice. ‘We will not do anything that breaks the law or any of the codes and agreements we have,’ he said.