Nail them to the wall
In September 2017 Philip Morris International (PMI) – one of the world’s largest cigarette companies – introduced a new foundation to the world: The Foundation for a Smoke Free World. This foundation will receive $80 million per year from PMI for the next 12 years and devote this money to researching “smoking cessation, smoking harm reduction and alternative livelihoods for tobacco farmers”, with the aim to draw in more money from non-tobacco donors over that time. It is seeking advice on how to spend its research money, and it claims to be completely independent of the tobacco industry – it receives money from PMI to the tune of almost a billion dollars, but it claims to have a completely independent research agenda.
The website for the Foundation includes a bunch of compelling statistics on its front page: There is one death every six seconds from smoking, 7.2 million deaths annually, second-hand smoke kills 890,000 people annually, and smoking kills half of all its long-term users. It’s fascinating that a company that as late as the late 1990s was claiming there is no evidence its product kills has now set up a foundation with such powerful admission of the toxic nature of its product. It’s also wrong: the most recent research suggests that 2/3 of users will die from smoking. It’s revealing that even when PMI is being honest it understates the true level of destruction it has wrought on the human race.
That should serve as an object lesson in what this Foundation is really about. It’s not an exercise in genuine tobacco control, but a strategy to launder PMI’s reputation, and to escape the tobacco control deadlock. If PMI took these statistics seriously it could solve the problem it appears to have identified very simply, by ceasing the production of cigarettes and winding up its business. I’m sure everyone on earth would applaud a bunch of very rich tobacco company directors who awarded themselves a fat bonus and simply shut down their business, leaving their shareholders screwed. But that’s not what PMI wants to do. They want to launder their reputation and squirm out from under the pressure civil society is placing on them. They want to start a new business looking all shiny and responsible, and the Foundation is their tool.
PMI have another business model in mind. PMI are the mastermind behind iQos, the heat-not-burn product that they are trialling with huge success in Japan. This cigarette alternative still provides its user with a nicotine hit but it does it through heating a tobacco substance, rather than burning it, avoiding much of the carcinogenic products of cigarettes. PMI have been touting this as the future alternative to cigarettes, and are claiming huge market share gains in Japan based on the product. Heat not burn technologies offer clear harm reduction opportunities for tobacco use: although we don’t know what their toxicity is, it’s almost certainly much lower than tobacco, and every smoker who switches to iQos is likely significantly reducing their long term cancer risk. What PMI needs is for the world to adopt a harm reduction strategy for smoking, so that they can switch from cigarettes to iQos. But the tobacco control community is still divided on whether harm reduction is a better approach than prohibition and demand reduction, which between them have been very successful in reducing smoking.
So isn’t it convenient that there is a new Foundation with a billion dollars to spend on a research platform of “smoking cessation, harm reduction and alternative livelihoods.” It’s as if this Foundation’s work perfectly aligns with PMI’s business strategy. And is it even big money? Recently PMI lost a court case against plain packaging in Australia – because although their foundation admits that smoking kills, they weren’t willing to let the Australian government sell packages that say as much – and have to pay at least $50 million in costs. PMI’s sponsorship deal with Ferrari will cost them $160 million. They spent $24 million fighting plain packaging laws in Urugay (population: 4 million). $80 million is not a lot of money for them, and they will likely spend as much every year lobbying governments to postpone harsh measures, fighting the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and advertising their lethal product. This Foundation is not a genuine vehicle for research, it’s an advertising strategy.
It’s a particularly sleazy advertising strategy when you consider the company’s history and what the Foundation claims to do. This company fought any recognition that its products kill, but this Foundation admits that the products kill, while PMI itself continues to fight any responsibility for the damage it has done. This company worked as hard as it could for 50 years to get as many people as possible addicted to this fatal product, but this Foundation headlines its website with “a billion people are addicted and want to stop”. This Foundation will research smoking cessation while the company that funds it fights every attempt to prevent smoking initiation in every way it can. The company no doubt knows that cessation is extremely difficult, and that ten dollars spent on cessation are worth one dollar spent on initiation. It’s precious PR in a time when tobacco companies are really struggling to find anything good to say about themselves.
And as proof of the PR gains, witness the Lancet‘s craven editorial on the Foundation, which argues that public health researchers and tobacco control activists should engage with it rather than ostracizing it, in the hope of finding some common ground on this murderous product. The WHO is not so pathetic. In a press release soon after the PMI was established they point out that it directly contravenes Article 5.3 of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which forbids signatories from allowing tobacco companies to have any involvement in setting public health policy. They state openly that they won’t engage with the organization, and request that others also do not. The WHO has been in the forefront of the battle against tobacco and the tobacco industry for many years, and they aren’t fooled by these kinds of shenanigans. This is an oily trick by Big Tobacco to launder their reputation and try to ingratiate themselves with a world that is sick of their tricks and lies. We shouldn’t stand for it.
I think it’s unlikely that researchers will take this Foundation’s money. Most reputable public health journals have a strict rule that they will not publish research funded by tobacco companies or organizations associated with them, and it is painfully obvious that this greasy foundation is a tobacco company front. This means that most researchers won’t be able to publish any research they do with money from this foundation, and I suspect this means they won’t waste their time applying for the money. It seems likely to me that they will struggle to disburse their research funds in a way that, for example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation do not. I certainly won’t be trying to get any of this group’s money.
The news of this Foundation’s establishment is not entirely bad, though. It’s existence is a big sign that the tobacco control movement is winning. PMI know that their market is collapsing and their days are numbered. Sure they can try and target emerging markets in countries like China but they know the tobacco control movement will take hold in those markets too, and they’re finding it increasingly difficult to make headway. Smoking rates are plummeting in the highest profit markets, and they’re forced to slimmer pickings in developing countries where tobacco control is growing in power rapidly. At the same time their market share is being stolen in developed countries by e-cigarettes, a market they have no control over, and as developing nations become wealthier and tobacco control strengthens e-cigarettes grow in popularity there too. They can see their days are numbered. Furthermore, the foundation is a sign that the tobacco companies’ previous united front on strategy is falling apart. After the UK high court rejected a tobacco company challenge to plain packaging laws, PMI alone decided not to join an appeal, and now PMI has established this foundation. This is a sign that the tobacco companies are starting to lose their previous powerful allegiance on strategy against the tobacco control movement. PMI admits they’ve lost, has developed iQos, and is looking to find an alternative path to the future while the other tobacco companies fight to defend their product.
But should PMI be allowed to take their path? From a public health perspective it’s a short term gain if PMI switch to being a provider of harm reducing products. But there are a bunch of Chinese technology companies offering e-cigarettes as an alternative to smoking. If we allow PMI to join that harm reduction market they will be able to escape the long term consequences of their business decisions. And should they be allowed to? I think they shouldn’t. I think the tobacco companies should be nailed to the wall for what they did. For nearly 70 years these scumbags have denied their products caused any health problems, have spent huge amounts of money on fighting any efforts to control their behavior, and have targeted children and the most vulnerable. They have spent huge amounts of money establishing a network of organizations, intellectuals and front groups that defend their work but – worse still – pollute the entire discourse of scientific and evidence based policy. The growth of global warming denialism, DDT denialism, and anti-environmentalism is connected to Big Tobacco’s efforts to undermine scientific evidence for decent public health policy in the 1980s and 1990s. These companies have done everything they can to pollute public discourse over decades, in defense of a product that we have known is poison since the 1950s. They have had a completely pernicious effect on public debate and all the while their customers have been dying. These companies should not be allowed to escape the responsibility for what they did. Sure, PMI could develop and market a heat-not-burn product or some kind of e-cigarette: but should we let them, when some perfectly innocent Chinese company could steal their market share? No, we should not. Their murderous antics over 70 years should be an albatross around their neck, dragging these companies down into ruin. They should be shackled to their product, never able to escape from it, and their senior staff should never be allowed to escape responsibility for their role in promoting and marketing this death. The Foundation for a Smoke Free World is PMI’s attempt to escape the shackles of a murderous poison that it flogged off to young and poor people remorselessly for 70 years. They should not be allowed to get away with it – they should be nailed to the wall for what they did. Noone should cooperate with this corrupt and sleazy new initiative. PMI should die as if they had been afflicted with the cancer that is their stock in trade, and they should not be allowed to worm out from under the pressure they now face. Let them suffer for the damage they did to human bodies and civil society, and do not cooperate with this sick and cynical Foundation.
Compromise and Conceit 
January 31, 2018 at 12:01 am
If I’m getting this right, they’re trying to maintain some kind of industry that requires the continued growth of large amounts of tobacco crop by claiming that they’ve developed a vapour-from-dried-leaves product – except this is nonsense since dry herb vapourisers have been around for years in the cannabis smoking community, developed by various American and Asian companies. Also, if you’re inhaling vapour, provided that you’ve chosen your liquid wisely, there’s really no need to get the flavour directly from tobacco leaves. Many people that try vapourisers end up experimenting with different flavours and become accustomed to those new flavours, so eventually the tobacco flavour just becomes one option amongst many. I would be slightly concerned about what Tobacco growers in say, South America, grew instead of Tobacco – if you catch my drift, but other than this, a big Tobacco industry is just not required.
A lot of these issues would be greatly helped by having a trusted and reliable, tax funded source of scientific information, that simply and clearly states what the evidence is, what’s known, and has zero interest in the politics of it. In the UK at one point we had a Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs headed by Prof. John Nutt and it was so unpopular with politicians and businesses that it’s has a greatly corrupted of diminished role in policy now.
Personally I don’t see how ‘punishing’ a brand name with regulation would really be justice. There’s no way that executives from the 1980’s are going to be impoverished because their old employer sells off their assets. Justice would be jailing or fining every individual who lied and mis-sold the product. The continued existence of a brand-name is irrelevant. If Morris was selling toilet cleaner instead of cigarettes, I’d buy it. Not buying it doesn’t punish anyone, it just puts people out of jobs. The real issue is whether or not the deceitful pathology is still there and if so, then why are prosecutions not flowing from that? Why do corporations so rarely have their licenses revoked for illegal actions? Why should they get to decide what’s settled in and out of court? Joel Bakan got it right years ago when he said that many corporations are systematically or institutionally psychopathic – it’s not that any particular person typically wants to kill everyone with cigarettes, but rather there is a pattern of business that flows from the legal structure which discourages true innovation and relies on steadying the ship and continuing with the same model until something forces change. The whole mythology around ‘job creation’ and ‘break-through’ moments is a good example of how they justify that to themselves and live in denial of the pathology. For instance, the main point of corporate responsibility policies is to sell the company to itself – to have it’s employees believe in the ‘new vision’ and how things are improving. Political parties work the same way.
One really disturbing thing that I found with old work colleagues that smoked was that they ignored a lot of the very obvious issues with cigarettes but seemed extraordinarily well informed about pop-corn lungs and other alleged risks from vapourisers. I tried to explain to them that the level of flavouring you would have to inhale can only be achieved if you work in fast food factories that use those particular flavours, hence the name, and they asserted that it was ‘better not to risk it – at least I know the risks with smoking’. I felt like I was in some strange Orwellian world of double-speak where tobacco corporations had somehow claimed the precautionary principle as theirs. In hospitals, alongside no-smoking signs, there were now no-vaping signs because apparently there was ‘no evidence that it was safe’. So that seems to be tobacco propaganda infiltrating hospitals even. My eyes nearly popped out of my head when I saw that.
I’ve smoked myself, but I was never under any pretense that it was anything other than poison. I just liked it. I choose not to do it any longer apart from occasional parties. The health benefits are immediate and very obvious. Indigestion seemed to be the only side effect from withdrawal, but that faded. It seems that with Tobacco, a large part of the ‘withdrawal’ is more psychological than physical (as opposed to heroin, where the physical effect is very obvious). I think this strong psychological element, if studied further, could be a strong justification for simply banning the commercial sale of tobacco. For instance, if you had a drug like psylocibin that is non-fatal but which causes crazy behaviour, then it would be removed from shops because of the risk to consumers (as it was in Amsterdam) even if it was still tolerated elsewhere in society. Similarly, if you live in Germany, you can paint a swastika in your home, but you can’t buy it in a shop because of the culture around that. Tobacco is somewhere in between the two. I would have a problem with banning it outright on the basis of civil liberties, but given the psychological and physical problems associated with it, I see no reason to make it easier or more convenient for people to buy it. For instance, if you could only buy loose tobacco, how many people would quit? A significant number I think, and they wouldn’t miss it either, because as a rolled up dried leaf it has no psychological or cultural ‘cool’ or power or attraction, leaving only the nicotine addiction, which can be easily remedied with a vapouriser, (which are improving all the time and getting safer).
Rather than arguing for a parental society that tries to protect people by punishing and banning, it would be far more simple to simply remove assistance, which is what a government does when it licenses cigarette sales and collects it’s share the profit in tax. If people are so determined to smoke, let them – but don’t help them or make it ‘forbidden’ or cool. If Morris is so determined to grow tobacco let them – but don’t facilitate their business model. These corporations fund any political party that claims government has gone too far yet they’re only too willing to have public institutions help them when the rules are bent in their favour. If tobacco was a foodstuff, it wouldn’t be licensed. So why do we create a special category for it?
January 31, 2018 at 1:58 pm
Ross M, I agree that the objection to the company diversifying its trade might seem like a strangely moral way to view a company (rather than an individual), but I think there is value to it. First of all, it is not as you suggest the staff from the 1980s who need to be punished for what this company did. As late as 1997 the company was still denying its products cause damage, and it is the current crop of board members, lawyers and marketers who have been pushing this product and the lies about it – this isn’t old history. Given that the kind of lies and corruption these people peddled are as much the product of the current staff as former staff, it is fair to say that the current mob should be punished for it. There is also a more practical reason, which is a total lack of trust in these people. If PMI were to diversify into pharmaceuticals, for example, would you believe for even one second the health and safety claims they made for their product? If their new pharmaceutical products caused cancer, would you trust them to tell you? Do you think an organization that has spread as much fear, distrust and slander as this should be allowed within spitting distance of a lobbying firm or a regulator of any kind? The reality is that these businesses have a 70 year history of lying about their product and corrupting the political process to ensure that their product’s safety is not questioned. They certainly should not, given this history, be allowed to manufacture anything else about which a safety requirement might be set: no, they can’t be trusted to sell seat belts, or fire extinguishers, or electric heaters, or anything else. So why trust them if they get their grubby fingers into vaping? No, they should be forced to stick to the product they have so comprehensively defended for the past 70 years, and in defense of which they have spread so much deceit and corruption. Let them go down with their rotten ship!
January 31, 2018 at 10:41 pm
I agree with everything you say about the history of the tobacco industry, but with all due respect, what you are claiming regards the current board seems like not only a strange argument but actually unjust. Here’s the current board of directors: https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/company-officers/PM.N – scanning through the biographies of those on the list or searching for them, you can see many of them are relatively young and some of them have only started working for PMI in recent years. There are also long-term employees in their 60’s and they would certainly be on any prosecutors hitlist if the laws existed to prosecute them. Whether it’s directors from the 60’s-80’s when I would say the worse offenses were committed (of particular interest to me is the the chemicals that had no business being in a tobacco product which I would say is criminal negligence), or from the 90’s when evidence on tobacco and cigarette harm was already widely known and ignored by smokers, they are all protected by corporate personhood.
So bizarrely, by focusing on punishing this ‘Philip Morris’ person – who does not exist by the way – you are allowing all of those criminals off scot-free. You say ‘let them go down with their rotten ship’ – but who are you talking about? Marjorie that works in accounts? Dick that runs the cleaning company at the HQ? Joan that works in the marketing department and has been asking her bosses to promote the new cleaner products? And you talk about a social contract of trust based on reputation – if the public cared about that, why is McDonalds still in business? Companies are not people. They are neither reputable nor trustworthy. They are machines, populated by individuals. A corporation like The Times that once wrote excellent science articles and science supplements for many years, gets purchased by Rupert Murdoch – all of sudden we see much less articles about climatology and many more about whether Boris Johnson is the next leader of the Tory party. Their past reputation or achievements count for very little unless there is some internal mechanism designed to maintain quality. The same film company that gave us Star Wars – A New Hope, gave us the Glenn Beck Show. The Unilever company that owns many of the cleaning brands in your home also has a major part in the Rainforest Alliance cartel which tries to undermine the work of the Fairtrade organisation to fix palm oil prices, but the majority of people who buy Persil have no idea about that, and why would they? Why should every shopper have to carry a text-book on the history of corporate crime every time they want to visit the supermarket?
In the last election I voted for Corbyn, but despite that, socialism is being dragged into the dirt by engaging in the corporate personhood dogma. It’s the perfect get out clause for criminals. The author I mentioned, Joel Bakan, is a Canadian constitutional lawyer and has been arguing this in his books and documentaries for many years. What’s more, classical free-market capitalism is at odds with corporate personhood. As someone that lives in Japan I’m sure you’re aware of the history of the Zaibatsu and the way reputation and association was manipulated there to undermine free-trade.
I work for HMRC and I am absolutely disgusted by the way my employer negotiates with corporations to decide how much tax THEY would LIKE to pay – abiding by the law has now become a fucking poker game. No – it should apply the same to everyone and loopholes should be closed where possible. Trying to regulate or sew Morris will not change corporate culture – they will just figure out a way to transfer their assets to other businesses either by consent or take-over, and the board members you think you are punishing will have off-shore funds, ring-fenced pension schemes, investment port-folios and may even sneak back onto another corporate board. The tobacco farms they own or run will be changed to a bio-fuel crop and they’ll get rich destroying the business of other farmers rather than smokers health. The only way to scare companies and businessmen into more ethical behaviour is to prosecute criminals, as you would with a small business and thereby change the parameters of the pathology. If I ran a cafe and I poisoned you to death, I would be jailed – so why doesn’t the law scale up. That’s the real question.
I’m sure you are an intelligent person, but as you can tell, I’m very tired of the way many people irrationally appeal to companies to behave themselves. There is no ship. Nothing will sink. Corporate culture is what passes through the trade medium, not the medium itself. Corporate responsibility is a marketing strategy.
January 31, 2018 at 11:07 pm
I absolutely agree that these people should be punished for what they did. But they won’t be. So the next best thing is to make sure that the corporate culture they created doesn’t get to persist. And I do think corporate culture can persist, and doens’t have to be evil – but this one is. So crush it!
January 31, 2018 at 11:16 pm
Absolutely – but what would be the most effective method of doing that? I have an uncle who recently retired from the board of directors of a major bank that is famous in the UK for it’s insane unethical behaviour. Having conversed with him occasionally, I can assure you, if you try to punish them via a particular brand name, not only will you not change the culture, you’ll force it to get even smarter and more insidious. The rule of law has to apply to everyone in a way which is commonly understood. No exceptions. And in order to achieve that, corporate law must be redesigned, starting with corporate personhood.