Tobacco.org

• MULLER: Right to light up  

Nazma muller talks to managing director of West Indian Tobacco Company Jean-Pierre du Coudray, a graduate of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, who feels that legislation for tobacco use should also protect smokers, and producers.

Q: Do you smoke?

A: Yes, but it's not because I work here. I've been smoking since I was 22. It's my choice. I was smoking for nine years, before I started working here. It's certainly not a prerequisite for working at Witco. In fact, less than 20 per cent of our employees smoke. In 2006, we discontinued a policy where every employee who smoked used to get, depending on their grade, anything between four to eight cartons of cigarettes a month. This is in line with our responsible approach-if you're an adult and you want to smoke, you have to go out there and buy your cigarettes like everybody else. . . .

Compared to the US and the UK, cigarettes are very cheap in T&T. How does Witco do it?

I wouldn't say they're cheap. They're average. In Guyana and Suriname, they're cheaper than here. What happened is we closed our factories in Jamaica, Guyana and Suriname, and that capacity was transferred to Witco. We brought in high-tech machines from Germany, so now we're much more efficient in terms of economies of scale.

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