A machine that puffs away and a Swedish smokeless 'tea bag' are weapons in BAT's quest to create safer products. But can cigarette makers ever succeed? asks Roland Gribben
Jump to full article: Electronic Telegraph (uk), 2008-04-24
Author: Roland Gribben
Intro: The tar yield displayed on the cigarette packet has become something of a ''safety'' guideline but, in the complex scientific and political world of research into smoking, the World Health Organisation and the US National Cancer Institute now say the level of risk is unchanged. There has been limited meeting of minds between tobacco and its considerable body of opponents on the basic health and safety issues. Overtures by the industry to set up joint research projects to reduce risks have made little headway.
"We are demonised,'' says one- time smoker David O'Reilly, BAT's head of public health and scientific affairs. Universities and their academic researchers shun tobacco money because they feel it is tainted and are uncomfortable about being dragged into awkward ethical issues. Jan de Plessis, BAT's non-smoking chairman, has offered to open doors and laboratories but was told by leaders of anti-smoking pressure groups:
"We do not want to sit down with a group responsible for an estimated 750,000 premature deaths each year.'' Governments are only too happy to sit down with the industry because they have it both ways. Tobacco is an important source of tax revenue and an easy target for pointing to an unhealthy lifestyle. . . .
The opposition is formidable and the deadly health argument impossible to counter. BAT, the world's second biggest group, is trying harder, combining aggressive defence with changes in behaviour and initiatives. Soul searching about its role in society, business values and the era of corporate and social responsibility has provided fertile ground for navel-gazing and ploughing funds into community projects and research.
The upshot is an extensive ''Harm Reduction'' programme encompassing a growing research and development commitment, fieldwork and extended consumer group studies. BAT hopes to attract the scientists into its laboratories via a website - BAT-science.com - to share its research findings with them. . . .
Science, says BAT, has still to determine which smokers will get a smoking-related disease and those who will escape. "Nor can science tell whether any individual became ill solely because they smoked,"
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