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• Curing The Addiction To Profits - Contents & Executive Summary (PDF) 

The year was 1987, and the Minister of National Health and Welfare, the Honourable Jake Epp, had recently introduced the draft Tobacco Products Control Act as Bill C-51 in the House of Commons. I was the civil servant responsible for the tobacco legislation file. Very quickly, it became clear that we had a tiger by the tail. The tobacco industry pulled out all the stops to defeat or weaken the government’s proposal to ban tobacco advertising.

Members of Parliament were assaulted with blizzards of letters arriving, seemingly from ordinary citizens protesting the new law. There were various texts, fonts, styles and paper stocks. It seemed like a genuine grassroots protest. In reality, it was an early example of fake write-in grassroots campaign organized by a corporation in its own private interest — a “grasstops” campaign. The tobacco industry hired high-profile lobbyists; they created fake coalitions of influential citizens (“Coalition 51”); and they bombarded us with reports they arranged to have sent to us from all over the world, from organizations like the Children’s Research Unit, the Smokers’ Freedom Society, INFOTAB, the World Federation of Advertising, and Freedom of the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (FOREST).

These and other petitioners they sent our way were all financed by the tobacco industry. . . . .

It was Sunday, March 8, 1998 and I was at home in Ferney-Voltaire, France, just across the border from Geneva, Switzerland where I worked at the World Health Organization (WHO) in charge of the Tobacco or Health Program. The telephone was ringing non-stop. Journalists and colleagues were calling me at home from all over the world, demanding an explanation of the story on page one of that day’s London Sunday Telegraph. The story began, “The world’s leading health organization [WHO] has withheld from publication a study which shows that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect.” . . .

Later, Elisa Ong and Stanton Glantz at the University of California researched the circumstances surrounding this event, and discovered that the tobacco industry had been tracking the IARC study since 1993, and spent far more in tracking the study and in planning and executing their masterful disinformation campaign than IARC spent to do the study. Ong and Glantz’s careful research was published in the respected medical journal The Lancet in April 2000, but received scarcely any media attention. Two years after the fact, the story was “old news.”

Tobacco industry misinformation, fanned by a well-oiled public relations machine, operating everywhere in the world, had trumped careful scientific work by well-meaning health professionals working for IARC, WHO and the University of California. To this day, tobacco industry apologists continue to cite the March 8, 1998 edition of the London Sunday Telegraph as “proof” that passive smoking does not cause lung cancer.

These are just two examples of many similar experiences I have had in nearly a quarter-century of full-time work on tobacco control. Now, finally, I am no longer lost in the trees; I can clearly see the forest.

What the tobacco industry was doing to the Canadian government in 1987 and 1988, and to the World Health Organization in 1998 was exactly what it was programmed to do. Tobacco companies are obliged by laws governing corporations to make money for their shareholders. They can only do this by selling more and more cigarettes. So Big Tobacco will never stop beating up on public health policies and public health agencies.

After all, their actions threaten cigarette sales, the only route to shareholder profit for tobacco companies. But the monstrous tragedy of this logic is that the more cigarettes they sell, the more their customers will get sick and die.

As long as we continue to allow tobacco companies to exist as forprofit business enterprises, every attempt we make to curb tobacco industry behaviour in the name of public health improvement control will be met by unceasing tobacco company efforts to defeat, attenuate, mitigate, delay, counter or confuse the new knowledge or new policy measures that tobacco companies think might cut into their sales.

We will never succeed in completely phasing out tobacco consumption until we remove profit-making from the tobacco business.

This book clearly spells out just why this must be done and proposes a variety of workable ways that it could be done.

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