HPHWD

In the mid-1990s, the two main British-based tobacco companies whose market was predominantly in the UK were Gallaher, now part of Japan Tobacco International and Imperial Tobacco. But their domestic market was declining and they needed to find new markets. So they sold abroad. Although this is perfectly legal, by the late 1990s Imperial Tobacco and Gallaher were exporting billions of cigarettes to countries where almost no one smoked them. These cigarettes were then entering the black market and were being smuggled back into the UK.

Over the long term, however, federal spending would be higher (on net) for federal retirement and health care programs as increases in the number of beneficiaries because of greater longevity outweighed the decline in average annual health care spending per capita.

May 31 is World No Tobacco Day. This year’s theme is tobacco industry interference, chosen, in WHO’s words, “to expose and counter the tobacco industry’s brazen and increasingly aggressive attempts to undermine the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC)”. In its 2008 report Tobacco industry interference with tobacco control, WHO outlines “the long history and the extent of tobacco industry efforts to avoid, delay and dilute” effective tobacco control policies. Key methods include lobbying, political donations, exploiting legislative loopholes, undermining or countering research, and funding groups or individuals to advance the tobacco industry’s objectives. Examples include the industry’s attempts to counter research by the International Agency for Research on Cancer that showed the link between passive smoking and lung cancer, and to undermine the US Environmental Protection Agency’s assessment of the risks associated with second-hand smoke. Direct funding of business analysts, scientists, and even historians has been important in promoting the interests of the tobacco industry over those of public health.

Bribing smokers with cash incentives helps them stop, US research suggests.

The most recent tobacco control policies, while allowing individuals to smoke, seek to nudge them at every opportunity towards less consumption. They aim to achieve this by changing the context within which all smoking choices are “made”. As such “libertarian paternalism” seems capable of accommodating the rather self-contradictory governmental stance towards tobacco products, which allows on the one side the legal marketing of a deadly and addictive product capable of generating significant income for both the industry and the government through taxation, while on the other heavily regulating and discouraging its consumption.