How the European Union plays the #Tobacco industry’s game

Last week, tobacco industry giant Philip Morris launched a campaign telling its customers to stop smoking. The company says its ‘Hold My Light’ campaign, which links to a website where smokers who want to quit can seek support, is “an important next step [to] ultimately stop selling cigarettes”.

Yet, far from accepting that the tobacco industry is trying to mend its ways, campaigners at Charity Cancer Research U.K. see Hold My Light as nothing more than “staggering hypocrisy.” Behind its veneer of contrition, they say, the industry continues pushing its core product in ever more nefarious ways, even conspiring to sabotage the World Health Organisation’s flagship Framework Convention on Tobacco Products (FCTC). Instead of leading the international community and treating Big Tobacco’s phony altruism with the contempt it deserves, even the EU may be playing along.

Hold My Light is just the latest attempt by Philip Morris to show it has changed its ways after years of denying the devastating consequences of smoking. At the start of the year, the company placed a series of ads claiming “we’re trying to give up smoking”. Its own chief executive says he wants his customers to abandon cigarettes in favour of smoke-free alternatives like iQOS. This approach is echoed by other tobacco industry leaders, who are suddenly happy to discuss the risks of smoking while promoting their e-cigarette products as smoking cessation aids.

These initiatives are accompanied by grandiose rhetoric. The Foundation for a Smoke-free World, funded by Philip Morris, says it is committed to “ending smoking in this generation”. Yet on closer inspection, it seems the tobacco industry is only committed to stamping out cigarettes in the developed world, where smoking rates are plummeting and e-cigarettes offer the only viable means of retaining market share. In the developing world, where legislation is much looser, the industry is more than happy to keep pushing its traditional product.

A WHO study, published in 2015, found people in low-income countries were almost 10 times as likely as those in developed countries to report exposure to tobacco marketing. Worse, 64% of stores sold single cigarettes, in a violation of the WHO’s framework convention which has been directly linked to the industry. As if this wasn’t nefarious enough, the industry also stands accused of targeting developing-world advertising at schoolchildren. These cynical tactics are having their desired effect: in Indonesia, where tobacco advertising laws are practically non-existent, the number of children aged 5 to 9 who smoke has tripled over the last 20 years. The overall smoking rate soared by 30% between 2000 and 2015.

Across the developing world, the pattern is similar. Whereas Big Tobacco is happy to concede ground in wealthy Western states, it fights for every inch in Africa and Asia. To push back when countries like Uruguay pass measures Big Tobacco doesn’t like, on issues such as plain packaging or health warnings, the industry deploys an army of lawyers to block the legislation in the courts. While American magnates Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg may have created a $4 million legal fund to help developing companies fend off these legal challenges, the industry has over €131.7 billion in annual sales.

Of all the industry’s tricks and ruses, none is more cynical than its involvement in the tobacco black market, which accounts for around 10% of all global trade and costs the world’s governments over €27bn in tax revenues. The tobacco manufacturers have spent millions on research that overestimates the volume of illicit trade, all to pin the blame on their smaller competitors. Despite these reports, researchers from Bath University’s Tobacco Control Research Group have found the tobacco industry is the source of around two-thirds of all illegal cigarettes, as manufacturers seek to build market and undermine the case for higher taxes.

The WHO’s Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade on Tobacco Products is supposed to provide a bulwark against these tactics. Created as a subsidiary of the FCTC, the Protocol has been described by WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as a “vital step towards a tobacco-free world”. The protocol came into effect last month, and its parties held their first meeting in Geneva at the start of October. One of their key priorities is the creation of an international traceability system, which is intended to track the origin of all cigarettes in circulation and curb tobacco smuggling through a unified global response.

The EU has pledged to play a leading role in this campaign. Plans for its own track-and-trace system are already well-advanced, and proponents are hoping to roll out the system next year in the hope it will become an international standard.

Unfortunately, the EU’s traceability system will fail to meet one of the WHO’s key criteria: total independence from industry interference.

The FCTC is clear that the tobacco industry must have no part in any track-and-track technology, and yet in Europe, the tobacco manufacturers has used a network of third parties and ‘front groups’ to lobby for its own traceability system, Codentify. That lobbying managed to convince the European Commission to consider a hybrid system which combines Codentify with a third party-operated alternative.

As Dr. Stella Bialous, who served as spokesperson for the FCTC COP8 and the Protocol’s MOP1 meetings this month, spelled out in a recent interview: “We are very much alert to the industry’s promotion, be it direct or indirect, of its own Codentify traceability system that is not entirely transparent... other names may appear for systems backed by the tobacco industry. There are matters of conflicting interests and of transparency, and we must remain very vigilant.”

If the EU is serious about leading the international community in its fight against the tobacco lobby, it needs to exclude Codentify and any other system that uses it as a model from Europe’s track-and-trace solution. The tobacco industry’s only priority is keeping its product alive, even as that product kills smokers and non-smokers by the millions. If Europe can’t recognize this malevolent intent, what chance do countries like Indonesia have?

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