“Care and feeding”: the Asian environmental tobacco smoke consultants programme

Abstract

Study objective:To review the tobacco industry’s Asian environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) consultants programme, focusing on three key nations: China, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.Methods:Systematic keyword and opportunistic website searches of formerly private internal industry documents.Main results:The release of the 1986 US Surgeon General’s report on second hand smoke provoked tobacco companies to prepare for a major threat to their industry. Asian programme activities included conducting national/international symposiums, consultant “road shows” and extensive lobbying and media activities. The industry exploited confounding factors said to be unique to Asian societies such as diet, culture and urban pollution to downplay the health risks of ETS. The industry consultants were said to be “…prepared to do the kinds of things they were recruited to do”.Conclusions:The programme was successful in blurring the science on ETS and keeping the controversy alive both nationally and internationally. For the duration of the project, it also successfully dissuaded national policy makers from instituting comprehensive bans on smoking in public places.

Tobacco industry sociological programs to influence public beliefs about smoking

“…This study reveals that, beyond previously-discovered industry projects aimed at altering the biomedical scientific landscape about tobacco (Hanauer, Slade, Barnes, Bero, & Glantz, 1995;Muggli, Forster, Hurt et al, 2001), weakening and defeating secondhand smoke policies globally (Assunta, Fields, Knight, & Chapman, 2004;Barnoya & Glantz, 2002), recruiting journalists to generate news articles supporting industry positions (Muggli, Hurt, & Becker, 2004), and influencing the amount of smoking in movies (Mekemson & Glantz, 2002), by the late 1970s the transnational tobacco companies had embarked on a highly coordinated program using the knowledge and power of social scientists to construct an alternate cultural repertoire (Swidler, 1986) of smoking to slow the decline in social acceptability of smoking worldwide. The books the industry commissioned were strategically designed and timed to counteract important public health pronouncements about tobacco, such as data describing the cost of smoking to employers and governments (Kristein, 1983;Luce & Schweitzer, 1977;Weis, 1981) and the 1988 Surgeon General's report characterizing nicotine as addictive (National Center For Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 1988).…”

Effective Interventions to Reduce Smoking-Induced Heart Disease Around the World

“…23 We know how to halt this epidemic: Implement the same strategies that have been applied successfully in many countries and provide support (including financial support) for tobacco-control advocates who are fighting the invasion of the multinational tobacco companies. Although there are obvious differences in cultural and political systems, some of the common strategies that the tobacco companies usebuying off the political leaders and recruiting physicians and scientists who claim that the evidence linking smoking and passive smoking to heart disease and other diseases is "controversial"-are universal, 16,20 as are the strategies for countering these efforts.…”

Enacting tobacco taxes by direct popular vote in the United States: lessons from 20 years of experience

“…As countries that have ratified the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control75 move to implement Article 6’s tax increase provisions, the lessons learnt in tobacco tax ballot initiatives in the United States should prove instructive on the tactics to expect from the tobacco industry and the pitfalls to be avoided by the proponents of a tobacco tax increase initiative. Just as the tobacco industry has done with efforts to eliminate secondhand smoke exposure,76 77 78 79 80 it could be expected to utilise tactics developed in the US in other countries.…”