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MAKING CONTACT Transcript: #46-00 Smoke Screen: U.S. Tobacco Overseas Phillip Babich: This week on Making Contact.... Robert Weissman: We've learned in California, I think that if you're willing to spend the money, and have the political will to run a strong enough campaign, you can probably eliminate tobacco as a public health problem in about ten years... Ronnie Cummins: What the tobacco companies have done is take all the tricks that they've learned in the United States, and then inflict that on developing countries who have not previously have exposure to Western style advertising and marketing... Phillip Babich: The U.S. tobacco industry is paying record-breaking settlements to states and consumer groups for health care costs related to smoking cigarettes. But to what extent are multibillion dollar losses in court really hurting the industry as U.S. tobacco companies rush overseas. On this program, we take a look at health costs in the international tobacco trade. I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact-- an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas, and important information. Until the 1960s, when warning labels about the health consequences of tobacco became mandatory for packaging, people in the United States were smoking with little concern or knowledge about the consequences, counting on government agencies to protect their health. And it wasn't until the 1990s that U.S. courts considered charges that the tobacco industry had been aware all along of the dangers involved. New evidence revealing their negligence has helped recent liability cases against the industry, and in general, smoking is becoming less attractive to people in the United States. But some tobacco companies are finding ways to keep their customers hooked. Smokers trying to cut back or quit can buy so-called "low-tar" versions of their favorite brand. However, according to Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association, one company boosted the nicotine in these cigarettes so that smokers were actually taking in higher levels than they were before. Ronnie Cummins: Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, in the late 1980s, thought they had a great idea. They teamed up with DNA Products, which is based in Oakland, California, to come up with a new product. The problem Brown & Williamson and the other tobacco companies were facing is that they were killing too many of their customers. 420,000 people a year were dying of lung cancer, instead of continuing to buy more cigarettes. The other problem they were having is the people were actually quitting smoking cigarettes. That's real bad for business. So they had a great idea: Let's genetically engineer tobacco so that it has seven times the level of nicotine contained in traditional tobacco, and let's smuggle this tobacco back into the United States from where we'll grow it in Brazil. And then let's surreptitiously put it, not into our high tar cigarettes, let's put it into the low tar cigarettes, so that the people trying to quit smoking won't be able to quit. Phillip Babich: These companies were able to get away with this because the Food and Drug Administration only tests the leaf for tar and nicotine levels, not the stems or other ingredients that make up the majority of the low-tar cigarette. According to Cummins, the two companies involved admitted to wrongdoing, but with few consequences. Ronnie Cummings: DNAP (DNA Products) from Oakland was allowed to plead to a lesser charge in 1994 in federal court. As reported by the New York Times, they pleaded guilty to unauthorized export of tobacco seeds to Brazil. This is DNAP pleaded guilty to this. Brown & Williamson admitted in papers that were made public to the New York Times that they had slipped this tobacco into their brands of low tar cigarettes in the United States. Phillip Babich: Further evidence of illegal practices of tobacco companies is illustrated in their involvement in Third World countries. Stella Aguinaga-Bialous works as a nurse and public health consultant. She recently finished a fellowship with the World Health Organization, or WHO, working on its Tobacco-Free Initiative. Aguinaga-Bialous says that tobacco companies have worked hard to undermine tobacco control efforts of the World Health Organization. Aguinaga-Bialous: As soon as the industry realized that the World Health Organization had some level of influence in developing countries, where the industry so far has been doing whatever they please, they start using the argument that developing countries do not need tobacco control. They need clean water, they need food, they need immunization for children. And to do that strategy, to develop that strategy, they did it both at the World Health Organization level, they used all the United Nations agencies, as well as the country level. So, for example, the government of Brazil, for a while, what the tobacco industry would do is they'd go to the states that were very poor and sponsor immunization campaigns. But the van that would go to this off the way areas, where there's no health care center to take people to immunize the kids, were vans painted with the logo of the most popular brand. So here's this, like, Marlboro equivalent (it wasn't the Marlboro it was at that time, it was a brand called Hollywood. It was a British American tobacco brand in Brazil). And so you see the Hollywood van going around these very, very extremely poor areas in the country, where there's dirt roads and things, immunizing kids. So you know there's this completely bizarre idea in states accepting that, because the state budget itself could not afford to do that. Phillip Babich: Aguinaga-Bialous adds that not only does tobacco use cause a number of diseases that can lead to death, smoking actually worsens the conditions of people suffering from any health problem. Nonetheless, tobacco companies have hired people to work within the World Health Organization and other United Nations agencies to throw tobacco control efforts off track. Aguinaga-Bialous: One, by trying to convince people, like I said before, for example, that they should go do immunization and not tobacco control. The other one is to put blocks to the development of funding of tobacco control efforts. Another alternative would be to put people to weaken programs that were proposed inside the tobacco control. And, for example, it became clear that they have somebody inside the Pan American Health Organization, which is the WHO regional office for the Americas. And they have a person there that was being paid by the tobacco industry to be undermining tobacco control effort in the Americas, from the inside. Phillip Babich: Until recently, U.S. tobacco companies have remained unscathed by product liability lawsuits. Thanks to whistleblowers, some of the backdoor dealings of the industry have been revealed, and courts are beginning to hold them accountable. Correspondent Krissy Clark has more. Krissy Clark: The camera pans as a group of young people unload 1200 corpses in body bags onto the doorsteps of a major tobacco company's headquarters. Voices: We're going to leave this there for you, so you can see what 1200 people actually look like. Krissy Clark: This slick advertisement ran on national television during Olympic coverage in September. The American Legacy Foundation produced the spot as part of a massive tobacco control ad campaign. The Foundation emerged out of the 1998 master settlement agreement between U.S. states and the tobacco industry. Under the settlement terms, the industry must pay close to 250 billion dollars to states over the next 25 years. This amount is meant to cover at least the future health care costs of tobacco use. The companies will also pay 1.5 billion dollars, to fund an independently run anti-smoking campaign. Meanwhile, they spend six billion dollars on tobacco advertising each year. The struggle for tobacco control in the U.S. has come a long way. The dangers of smoking originally burst into public consciousness in the 1950s, when an article appeared in Readers Digest, called "Cancer By The Carton." Calls came at the community level from around the country to regulate the tobacco industry, but government regulation never came. The industry took immediate action to keep the government out of the issue. In secret meetings at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, the leaders of the nation's biggest tobacco firms, and a prominent public relations agency, organized a unified political strategy. It involved a massive ad campaign, with a full page ad in every newspaper, called "The Frank Statement," where the industry committed itself to getting to the bottom of the smoking and health controversy. What took place at the Plaza Hotel meeting is the primary focus of recent lawsuits brought by states against the tobacco industry. Individual lawyers, as early as in the 1950s, attempted to sue the industry on behalf of smokers on grounds of product liability. With no access to the companies' documents, and scant financial resources compared to the industry's, these efforts failed. But in the 1990's, momentum built, as law firms pooled their energies and states got involved. Dr. Stanton Glantz is a professor of Medicine at the University of San Francisco and author of "The Cigarette Papers" and "Tobacco Wars." When 4000 pages landed on Glantz's desk, sent by an anonymous Mr. Butts, challenges to the tobacco industry gained access to incriminating papers, which tobacco companies had, until then, illegally withheld. In the documents, industry leaders themselves frankly stated that they were involved in the business of selling a deadly product. They acknowledged that smoking caused cancer and heart disease, and nicotine was addictive. Armed with this new information, states began resting cases on a new legal theory. Dr. Stanton Glantz: These cases were fraud cases, and they were arguing on behalf of the taxpayer, saying that the tobacco industry had defrauded the taxpayers by lying about the health effects of smoking, which led more people to smoke, which led more people to get sick... which meant Medicaid had to pay for more sick people. Krissy Clark: Glantz says, when you look at smoking-related health care costs, combined with loss of productivity due to the illness and death that tobacco causes, the 250 billion dollars that the cigarette companies will pay under the master settlement agreement, only covers 10% of what the tobacco industry actually costs society each year. An analysis by the head of Northeastern University's Tobacco Products Liability Project found that the settlement is too small to hurt the companies financially. As it stands, according to the analysis they make domestically around eight billion dollars a year, and have ample room to raise prices without losing customers. Glantz is one of numerous tobacco control advocates who warn of the continuing power tobacco companies have in American government and society. The tobacco industry is the nation's largest campaign contributor to the Republican party, and the cigarette, which Glantz calls the most dangerous consumer product on the market, has zero regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. While Glantz says the U.S. government should regulate tobacco better, he celebrates the unprecedented battles that have been won against the industry in recent years. At the state, and just recently at the federal level, governments are beginning to hold tobacco companies accountable for their damage to public health. Some states like California are even anticipating an end to smoking as a public health threat. Overseas, however, the epidemic of smoking-related death and illness is predicted only to get worse. Ross Hammond is with the campaign for tobacco-free kids. He's been working on issues of tobacco and globalization for the last several years. Ross Hammond: It's very much an enormous global public health crisis. And you know, and the other thing is that this crisis is being exported to developing countries. Essentially what's going to happen is, countries are going to have to go through the same crisis we're having now in the United States. Now every year we lose 420,000 of our brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, loved ones to tobacco. We actually have the power to do something about this if we can just get the political will to get these companies under control. Start putting some real regulations on them and start forcing them to tell the truth about what they're doing. Phillip Babich: You are listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. If you want more information about this broadcast we'll be giving out our toll-free number at the end of this program. Krissy Clark: Tobacco is the leading cause of death worldwide. It results in more than deaths than HIV, maternal mortality, automobile accidents, homicide and suicide combined. According to a World Bank report, smoking currently kills 1 in 10 adults. By 2030 tobacco is expected to be the world's single biggest cause of death accounting for about 0 million deaths a year. By then 70 percent of all deaths from tobacco will occur in developing countres up from around 50 percent today. With predictions like these, tobacco has cast an ominous shadow across the face of globalization. Again, Ross Hammond... Ross Hammond: Increasing deaths from tobacco are a perfect example of what happens when you completely deregulate the global economy without any regard to the products that are being sold, without any regard to public health where the priority is open markets and that's the final word. Krissy Clark: Hammond says that tobacco companies began increasing their presence internationally in the 1980's during the Reagan administration's push for open markets abroad. As U.S. markets for tobacco were declining, a thirst for more profits and new markets sent the industry overseas. According to Hammond the industry's international revenues took off in the 1990's. Philip Morris, the world's largest multi-national tobacco company, saw their international tobacco revenues increase more than 200 percent between 1989 and 1999. As powerful advocates of so-called free-trade the U.S. government has played a key role in the industry's overseas expansion. Under the Reagan and Bush administrations, the U.S. threatened trade sanctions on Asian countries that wouldn't open up to American tobacco sales. When Thailand, a world leader in tobacco control regulations, refused to lift it's ban on tobacco imports, the U.S. took them to the GATT, the predecessor to the World Trade Organization, to challenge their policies. More recently, this September, despite outcries from the public health community, congress passed the China Trade Agreement. Buried in the thousand page bill is a provision to reduce tariffs on imported cigarettes. Hammond calls it an enormous disappointment. Ross Hammond: You simply cannot treat tobacco as just another good traded internationally. It is a hazardous product. It kills half of the people who use it regularly. There has to be an exception in these trade agreements for tobacco. Krissy Clark: Hammond says members of the public health community think the China Trade bill will benefit companies like Philip Morris while leading to more cigarette addiction, sickness and death in China. Throughout the world studies have shown from Poland to Japan that as U.S. tobacco companies penetrate overseas markets smoking rates go up. One reason that might explain this pattern is aggressive marketing styles. Robert Weissman is co-director of Essential Action, a Washington-based corporate accountability group. Robert Weissman: What the tobacco companies have done is take all the tricks that they've learned in the United States to adapt all of the Madison Avenue savvy that they've gathered in decades of experience here, and then inflict that on developing countries and the former Soviet Union countries and countries in Eastern Europe who did not previously have exposure to western-style advertising and marketing. And the result has been a real surge in interest in U.S. and multi-national brands. The techniques involve all the kinds of advertising that we see here-- television advertising, which does not take place in the United States, especially trying to associate smoking and cigarettes with the music industry, with entertainment industry and with sports. The idea is ironically to associate smoking with all things that seem youthful and vigorous. Krissy Clark: Many countries in Asia and Eastern Europe had until recently state-run tobacco monopolies and relatively mild marketing. He says the U.S. tobacco companies that enter these markets often target children, young adults and women-- anti-smoking to perceived American values. Robert Weissman: Freedom, liberty, wealth, having fun, youthfulness, and material well-being. And they do that in very blatant ways so that the slogan for cigarettes in Asia for example often involve things like "Taste of America," or "The Spirit of America," or "Get a Taste of America." Advertisements might feature Statue of Liberty and so on. So a very really kind of crass appeals, at least to an American eye, have a significant effect and a really harmful one in a lot of developing country markets. Krissy Clark: Stella Aguinaga-Bialous is a nurse and public health consultant. Originally from Brazil, she completed a fellowship at the World Health Organization's tobacco-free initiative. Reflecting on the history of tricks and crimes committed by the American tobacco industry Aguinaga-Bialous says during the discussions around the China Trade bill, the U.S. missed a golden opportunity. Met with the chance to make a strong statement about tobacco control and the role of the United States in the worldwide tobacco control movement, she says the U.S. decided instead to support and subsidize exports for tobacco companies. Aguinaga-Bialous: This was another opportunity that the U.S. would have to show the world that they indeed are not interested in exporting death and disease to other countries. Do as I say not as I do or whatever. Here we are controlling tobacco and restricting it, vast legislation and regulation. Meanwhile, we don't care if people in China start having, you know kids in China 30 years from now all having lung cancer. Krissy Clark: Aguinaga-Bialous says the United States is gaining a reputation as a weakening force in global tobacco regulation. But in the States, some activists are trying to change that. There are discussions of legislative initiatives that would make it illegal for domestic tobacco companies to do things overseas, that are prohibited in the U.S. And around the world both an association with the World Health Organization and independently, tobacco control advocates are doing some globalization of their own. Again, Stan Glantz of UCSF... Dr. Stanton Glantz: People at the international level are now sharing a lot more information than they were before. Ten years ago, if the industry showed up in Sri Lanka doing some naughty thing, or bringing in one of their pseudo-scientists, it would be six months before anybody knew about it. And they would be there, do their dirt, and gone before the public health people even understood what was going on. Today, when these guys show up, it goes out on some listserv all over the world, and there's a huge amount of information going back and forth. So the industry's sort of taking advantage of the fact that people have a hard time believing how much lying they do, and tend to take things at face value isn't working as well for them as it used to. Krissy Clark: For Making Contact, I'm Krissy Clark. Phillip Babich: To get a closer look at the way tobacco companies are targeting young people, and taking advantage of loose regulations internationally, Making Contact's Laura Livoti spoke with Coumba Toure. Toure, traveling between Senegal and Mali, where she was raised works with young women's groups and with the Institute for Popular Education. Coumba Toure: If you go to any big events, that really interests young people, whether it's sports, whether it's music, anything on the beach that a lot of young people, from teenagers to young adults would go... you will have tobacco sponsoring. What they call it, whether it's raffle or tickets and stuff like that, that you fill out, on the package of the cigarettes, and you send it back to them, and then you can win maybe a trip to the U.S., and things like that. It's just, you know, very, very sad. Laura Livoti: In the summer of 1997, I spent a little bit of time in Mali, in a town called Kati, and I didn't see anybody smoking, really, during the time that I was there. Between that time, from 1997 to now, the year 200, has that changed? Coumba Toure: People smoke, yeah. And they smoke a lot. In Kati and Dakar, and it's not that recent. And I would say that it's more... it kind of started a little in 1994... 1995. But then the boom in terms of, like, advertising and things just happens in this last, maybe, you know, three years, when there's a lot of money out there. And it's a lot of struggle, I mean it might, you know like even youth activist organizations that work in terms of trying to do some political change and stuff like that. I, you know, get to struggle within those groups to ask them not to take tobacco money. Laura Livoti: So even activist groups are taking tobacco money? Coumba Toure: Yes, because it is, you know, when we organize a fundraising in a little town like Kati, we're organizing a party, you know, we go around and look for a sponsor. For the tobacco company, you don't need to look back around... they come to you. And they give things that nobody else can compete with. I have like a simple example. I had this group of young people, that work with education, and they were part of a club called Unesco, Club Unesco, and they wanted to do a good program. And they say, "We'll organize this." And they came and they say, "Well, the tobacco company is proposing to give us the sound system, and pay for the place that we're going to use to do the program. So it's going to make sure that our fund-raising going to work, because we don't have to pay that money, and we'll use every money that we get for people that pay for the ticket." You know, we work and fight around it, but at the end we lost that battle, because the Institute for Popular Education that I work with didn't want to get into that. But we couldn't give them a better sound system than what the tobacco company had. They had the best sound system around there that nobody else had. And it was hard you know because I was looking there like I wish we could have a sound system that we could give to young people that freely, that easily and they don't need to get this, and have to put in the middle of their event some ad for some tobacco company, or collaborate with them, wear their T-shirts, you know, things like that. But it's so common. And now this is like young people that are in the pathway of you know really trying to change things and being conscious. You know, let alone just like the general population. Laura Livoti: What is the state of the anti-tobacco movement in West Africa? Coumba Toure: Well, that's really hard. I joined the anti-tobacco movement around 1994, 1995. The Movement Anti-Tabac, based in Senegal, you know with a group of young people started it, but now it's you know more of adult group. But I used to do programs in schools, in communities and work with tobacco addiction, try to get people out of it that already started smoking and prevent people who were not smoking to get in it. But it's a very, very hard battle there. Because you're fighting against information, you know, false information that is there. People don't even believe when you start explaining what tobacco is doing to them, because there is such a false information about it. And when you speak about it, it's very hard to go through. And I believe because of the fact that people here have fought and have won, that there is a chance and there's an opening for all the people somewhere else. But that link is not done. It doesn't really exist. The information slips little by little. It's not even a lot of people who ever heard that the tobacco companies going through any hard time. Like if you go to Mali or Senegal, they're totally fine. They're doing things the old way they used to do it. They still give away cigarettes. It's like, you know, there's just nobody really challenging their ways of being. As it was here for a long time. Everybody believed that no, it's not that addictive, it's a very light drug, you can stop whenever you want. Oh no, they don't put special product in it. Like, it's not, that information is not really out there. And the anti-tobacco movement really suffers from that. Phillip Babich: Coumba Toure, speaking with Laura Livoti. And that's it for this edition of Making Contact-- a look at the tobacco industry and efforts to rein it in. Thanks for listening. And special thanks this week to Orla Rapple, who provided production assistance. Laura Livoti is our Managing Director. Peggy Law, executive director. Associate producer, Stephanie Welch. Senior advisor, Norman Solomon. National producer, David Barsamian. Women's desk coordinator, Lisa Rudman. Production assistant, Shereen Meraji. And, I'm your host and managing producer Phillip Babich. If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts. That's 800-529-5736. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter trio. Bye for now. |