- by Marcus Browning
- The Guardian
- Issue #2140
In 2023, British American Tobacco (BAT) and Meta were dishonourably distinguished with a Dirty Ashtray award and the inaugural Exploding Vape award at a ceremony in Perth.
Presented by the Australian Medical Association (AMA) and the Australian Council on Smoking and Health (ACOSH), the awards spotlight industry and organisations which undermine Australia’s tobacco and vaping control strategies.
British American Tobacco, the force behind the deceptively named Responsible Vaping Australia (RVA), received its award for initiating and financing a concerted astroturf campaign to undermine public health policy on vaping in Australia.
Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, won its award for failing to enforce its own policy banning the promotion of tobacco or nicotine products on its platforms.
ACOSH Co-CEO Laura Hunter said RVA is a front for British American Tobacco which wants vapes available in retail settings. “BAT, through the RVA, pretends to be concerned about the black market in e-cigarettes and the rise in youth vaping.
“Hiding behind RVA, BAT has lobbied governments and co-opted various community sectors and organisations who may be unaware big tobacco is behind their astroturf lobby campaign. For this reason they are worthy winners of the 2023 Dirty Ashtray Award.”
The inaugural Exploding Vape Award exposes those who support and further the message of the tobacco industry. Meta has an enormous power to influence.
Hunter noted: “In a policy proudly displayed on its website, Meta expressly commits to disallow e-cigarette advertising or promotion on its platforms. It only takes a few seconds to see this is not being enforced.
“Meta’s platforms are being used to promote the use and sale of e-cigarettes, and making them easily accessible to a younger and younger audience.”
AMA President Professor Steve Robson said the government had taken important steps to ban nicotine vaping products, and only allow access to them with a doctors’ prescription.
“Tobacco remains the leading preventable cause of death and disease in Australia, while the evidence of health threats from e-cigarettes continues to grow, hooking younger generations onto an addictive product.
“Big tobacco is still in big business and we saw its attempt to undermine the TGA’s recent vaping reform consultation. Hundreds of individual submissions parroted text from an astroturf campaign.
“The dirty ashtray and exploding vape awards illustrate the need to address unregulated advertising of nicotine products on social media and stop tobacco industry players from funding political and lobby groups.
“We in health, and our colleagues in tobacco control, stand behind the government in their rollout of new tobacco and vaping reforms for the sake of the health of all Australians,” Professor Robson said.
DEADLY PRODUCTS
The fight against big tobacco’s deadly profitable products gained greater momentum during the 1980s. By the 2000s, in the face of scientific evidence, tobacco companies were still lobbying against health warnings.
In 2004 they were silent about a wide range of newly-revealed diseases caused by their products – at the same time noisily opposing new packet health messages which would inform smokers about these dangers.
A landmark US Surgeon-General’s report showed for the first time that smoking causes diseases in almost every part of the body – with conclusive links to leukaemia and cancers of the cervix, kidney, pancreas, and stomach; as well as abdominal aortic aneurysm, pneumonia, cataracts, periodontitis and more.
The tobacco industry lobbied hard for warnings to be weakened and delayed for as long as possible – though it was clear their consumers were harmed as a result of ignorance about the many and varied harms caused by tobacco.
The warnings, originally proposed by the government to take effect in mid-2004, were then delayed until mid-2005. This was followed by a revised Regulation Impact Statement by the Federal Treasury proposing manufacturers be given until 2006.
The Cancer Council said, “All smokers have basic consumer rights to truth and safety. Yet both have been denied and fought by tobacco interest groups to protect their own commercial self-interests.”
The National Heart Foundation warned: “We urge the government not to cave in to the interests of tobacco companies but to put public health and consumer rights first – without further delays.”
The government then announced – after six years of consultations – that it would ignore the advice of health authorities and accept the tobacco industry’s favoured position that the new graphic warnings should occupy only 30 per cent of the front of packets – not the 50 per cent proposed by health experts.
FRUIT-FLAVOURED CANCER STICKS
Health groups then had to call on the government to ban the sale of fruit-flavoured cigarettes, saying the new brands are to influence teenagers to smoke, following revelations that the government had softened the planned health warnings.
The three major tobacco companies in Australia had a word with the government and the warnings were downgraded.
The tobacco companies demanded the warnings be made smaller, Imperial Tobacco Australia telling the government the warnings were a “heavy-handed proposal to placate the anti-tobacco lobby.” Philip Morris Ltd was so eager to help the Health Department that the tobacco giant put its own health warning proposals to the junior minister.
Then Health Minister Tony Abbot refused to give any reasons for the warnings being changed.
The new fruity brand, called “DJ Mix,” imported from Hong Kong, distributed in Australia by the Sydney-based Trojan Tobacco Company, featured “a range of fruit flavours” and were clearly aimed at hooking young people.
Then Federal Parliamentary Secretary on Health, Christopher Pyne said there was nothing the government could do to stop the fruit cigs – that it was up to state and territory governments to act against them.
In 1989 the federal government was forced to ban the most cynical attempt at sleight-of-hand by the pedlars of death – smokeless tobacco – by amending the Trade Practices Act.
BIG TOBACCO UNDERMINES TREATY
In 2005 the major tobacco companies tried to manipulate and undermine the world’s first treaty – the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) from the World Health Organisation – to reduce the growing tobacco epidemic worldwide – particularly in developing countries.
A report, Big Tobacco’s Attempts to Derail the Global Tobacco Treaty: Cases from Battleground Countries, accused major companies of meddling in health policy around the world – including in many developing countries – by aggressively using their economic muscle to derail the treaty process.
The report was produced by Corporate Accountability International (CAI), a membership organisation in the World Health Organisation’s initiative. The report named corporations like Philip Morris (now Altria), British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International (JTI) among those seeking to bring down the treaty in the eleventh hour.
The report says tobacco corporations attempted to craft a “socially responsible” image and claim publicly to support the treaty, while encouraging policymakers to draft legislation that would fail to fulfil the treaty’s central obligations – notably the ban on tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship.
The report also points out that in some countries – including the USA – that has not ratified the treaty, big tobacco was aggressively increasing political interference and expanding operations.
“Tobacco companies are actively promoting themselves as ‘socially responsible’ corporations whilst behind the scenes they are undermining health policies – particularly in poorer countries,” Anne Jones, Chief Executive of Action on Smoking and Health Australia, stated at the time.
“Although Australia has ratified the treaty, it is not immune to such tactics,” she warned – pointing out that tobacco companies are promoting themselves widely at expert forums as “socially responsible” corporations; they have also gained further delays to new health warnings for consumers as well as a partial ban only on their use of misleading and deceptive terms.
PROFIT ABOVE ALL
No amount of deaths will stop the drive for more and more profits. In 1999 the tobacco companies in the US lost a class action damages case brought against them on behalf of half a million diseased smokers and the heirs of smokers who had died from their addiction.
A jury found the tobacco companies had conspired to keep the dangers of smoking hidden from the public.
The jury decided that the tobacco companies had made and marketed a defective and addictive product and were consequently liable for damages.
Considering how many millions of people have suffered early – and usually painful, wretched – deaths, and how the tobacco industry persisted in pushing its deadly product as hard as ever long after health experts identified the mortal effects of cigarettes, any amount of damages would seem small.
Surely it ought to be an offence to spend lots of money glamourising a deadly substance to convince people to become addicted to it.
It is the public health system that has to shell out the millions for victims of tobacco company greed. For the tobacco industry, public health, even the very lives of its customers, matter not a bit. All that matters was and is profits. In the cause of bigger profits any act is justifiable.
They target youngsters, perversely using sport to get them hooked on a product that will ruin their health.
Unable to sell their cheaper, high-tar-content and more carcinogenic smokes in developed countries because of awareness campaigns by the medical profession, they happily went off and marketed them in developing countries.
The tobacco companies fought the case for five years.
This article is dedicated to the memory of Sebastian, who died in February at 38 from lung cancer, leaving behind a partner and their two children.
