Big Tobacco is testing out a new strategy to hijack public health initiatives. Attempting to skew popular perceptions, industry body Tobacco Institute of South Africa (Tisa) is paying social media celebrities to promote the hashtag #TakeBackTheTax, in an aggressive effort to co-opt the fight against illicit tobacco trade.
Tisa’s latest campaign is timed meticulously, following South Africa’s July announcement of proposed anti-tobacco legislation aimed at curbing advertising for tobacco and smoking in public places. The stringent Control of Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery Systems Bill also includes measures to institute plain packaging, a ban on point-of-sale advertising and displays, and the prohibition of the sale of single cigarettes. Violators of the new law, if it is passed, would face fines and up to three months in jail.
#TakeBackTheTax is far from the tobacco industry’s only weapon to derail the new tobacco control legislation. Japan Tobacco International (JTI) has already poured money into radio adverts encouraging the public to protest the proposals on freedom of choice grounds. Meanwhile Tisa has employed scare tactics for months, implying that the proposed law would be responsible for everything from investors fleeing South Africa to bankrolling organised crime syndicates.
Tisa has tried to justify its opposition to the proposed legislation by claiming that the government is using inaccurate economic impact data. The real story behind the tobacco industry’s united resistance to the legislation, however, is far more sinister. Big Tobacco’s indignation at this new bill is merely an escalation of the industry’s long-standing efforts to interject itself in government initiatives against tobacco smuggling, relying—as ever—on relentless misdirection to “paint itself as both the victim and the saviour”.
This modus operandi is a well-established staple of Big Tobacco. Indeed, the industry’s self-reported good intentions routinely threaten to derail international policy efforts against tobacco smuggling. Tobacco companies have used data they themselves have funded to overstate the size of the cigarette black market and to claim that plain packaging efforts will lead to a rise in illicit trade.
Not only has this been thoroughly debunked by a number of studies, but evidence indicates that Big Tobacco is itself complicit in the trade, with cigarette manufacturers using the black market as a means of tax avoidance. Former British American Tobacco (BAT) chairman Kenneth Clarke even admitted to producing cigarettes he knew would end up sold under the table when he brazenly claimed: “Where any government is unwilling to act [on stamping out illicit tobacco trade] or their efforts are unsuccessful, we act, completely within the law, on the basis that our brands will be available alongside those of our competitors in the smuggled as well as the legitimate market”.
Big Tobacco’s manipulative attempts to rebrand itself as an anti-smuggling crusader are particularly in the spotlight in the lead up to two key October tobacco control meetings: the COP8 and MOP1, aimed at taking stock of the progress on implementing the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) – an international tobacco control standard signed by 168 countries.
With the FCTC Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products finally coming into effect on 25 September, jurisdictions are trying to nail down the particulars of how they will track and trace (T&T) tobacco products to tackle the lucrative smuggling operations. As policymakers hash out the details of how they will follow tobacco products from factory to consumer, Big Tobacco representatives are bent on getting their fingers in the pie.
The FCTC Protocol stipulates that global T&T efforts must be wholly independent from the tobacco industry. In spite of this, tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PMI) has thus far been allowed to adapt its own tracking system, Codentify—which it licensed to three of its fellow tobacco giants at no cost— to meet T&T requirements.
The technology PMI has cooked up, rightfully described as a Trojan horse, fails basic security requirements and is open to code cloning, recycling and migration—all while compromising the confidentiality of enforcement investigations. Codentify’s true purpose, namely shielding and preserving the tobacco industry’s vested interest in the black market for cigarettes, is clear.
The FCTC Secretariat has made it clear that Codentify is not an acceptable solution. To that end, it specified that Codentify is not even strictly speaking a T&T system, but rather “a code generator system installed at the production line that creates unique codes on packs” which might conceal hidden features unbeknownst to everyone but the tobacco companies which created it. Despite the FCTC’s outspoken opposition to Codentify or similar technology, the tobacco industry’s relentless lobbying has paid some dividends: the EU is putting in place a “mixed” solution to T&T, in which some responsibilities would be entrusted to the industry.
Policymakers around the world should need no further evidence as to why the tobacco industry cannot be trusted to weigh in on the fight against cigarette smuggling, but sneaky public relations ploys like the #TakeBackTheTax campaign just emphasise how untrustworthy Big Tobacco really is.
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