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Treat tobacco industry like ‘organised crime’

Health activists have called on the government to make tobacco companies international pariahs, following the latest exposure of dirty tricks waged by the tobacco industry against anti-smoking research.

‘From now on, no government should treat the tobacco industry, anywhere in the world, as a normal, respectable commercial enterprise,’ said Donald Reid, tobacco spokesperson for the public health organisation UKPHA. ‘It should be treated in exactly the same way we deal with organised crime.’

And anti-tobacco pressure group ASH called on all governments and the WHO to ‘cease dialogue with the tobacco companies regarding science and regulatory matters’. ASH director Clive Bates said: ‘All they want to do is confuse, delay, and obstruct — so why talk to them.’

The calls followed the uncovering of covert attempts by the tobacco industry to halt and undermine a 10-year scientific study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) on the dangers of passive smoking.

The tobacco industry feared that the study’s findings would lead to European countries taking a tougher line against smoking in public places. (The study eventually concluded there was a 16 per cent increase in risk of lung cancer for non-smokers from passive smoking and a 17 per cent increase for those exposed to passive smoking in the workplace.)

According to research by Elisa Ong and Stanton Glantz (Lancet, 8 April 2000), ‘elaborate plans’ to undermine the study ‘were developed by [tobacco company] Philip Morris’s top management’ and ‘implemented by an elite task force’. Other tobacco companies brought on board included R J Reynolds (USA), Rothmans (UK), Imperial (UK), British American Tobacco and Reemtsma (Germany).

Ong and Glantz, from the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, say: ‘Philip Morris alone budgeted at least $2m (£1.26m) for the IARC plans for just one year and proposed $4m for studies to discredit the IARC’s work.’

They say that the tobacco companies’ campaign aimed to affect the wording of the IARC study’s conclusions and results, and counteract the potential impact of the study on government policy. Their efforts resulted in newspapers in the UK, US, Australia and Brazil claiming misleadingly that the IARC research had found that passive smoking was not harmful and might even be beneficial.