TOBACCO ROAD UNDER REPAIR ... DETOUR AHEAD
by sonya
hammond
While U.S. cigarette companies might consider hiring a few Simpson attorneys who specialize in twisting fact into fiction, they don't need help from anyone in the area of creative denial or arm-twisting.
But the biggest concern in their latest ploy to save their nicotine-stained profits is not their refusal to admit that their product is addictive, or even that their $300 billion+ offer to compensate consumers who might have fallen or will fall ill for causes having, they still insist, no connection with their product, has considerably more to do with the bottom lines of their financial reports than it does with any unlikely altruistic motives.
What should concern those even slightly in touch with reality is whether or not anyone will be stupid enough to accept a so-called settlement that will do nothing to stop what should be viewed as premeditated manslaughter in the millions.
Naturally,
surprise, surprise, there are limitations to the tobacco industry's
philanthropy. The multi-billion dollar fund would be financed partially by
raising cigarette prices, ironically forcing smokers to pay the extra cost of
cigarettes in order to produce the extra profits cigarette companies will use to
help pay off dying smokers, their heirs, lawyers and governments who have footed
health care bills for smoking-related illness the industry doesn't believe they
have.
Although this could reduce sales [and inadvertently save lives], tobacco stock prices, which have slumped dramatically, show signs of going back up if the industry's image is improved by a settlement. Cigarette companies theorize that the settlement is a gamble that could actually pay off with even greater future profits.
In the meantime, lurking behind the smokescreen, advertising agencies applaud a federal judge's decision that restrictions on billboards and ads in teen magazines would be illegal. Sighs of relief could be heard all over Madison Avenue, which, while piously blustering about violation of the First Amendment looks to tobacco companies for about $180 million a year, 10% of their national billboard revenue, and is a major beneficiary of an industry whose spending on advertising and promotion has jumped 250% between 1970 and 1994.
As more American smokers take the pledge, the tobacco companies turn their greedy sights on overseas markets, where there are fewer, if any restrictions. Still, they can't bear to give up recruiting all those prospective American teen-age smokers, if they can manage to do it with a pack of Camels in one hand and a few bucks for the terminally ill in the other.
But if the tobacco industry really wanted to help American smokers they would simply move their factories to Switzerland which is already so expert in denial that they contend that the world's most organized monetary institutions have no idea of the despicable origins of truckloads of Nazi gold. The profit-oriented Swiss shouldn't have any trouble ignoring the motives of several of the world's wealthiest manufacturers.
The really creative aspect of the tobacco industry's settlement proposal, however, is their contention that because they are willing to indulge in such foreign activities as honesty, responsibility and concern for their consumers [non-addicted though they must be], and since they are offering to finance a fund over 25-30 years to compensate, in spite of their innocence, for tobacco-related problems, it seems only fair that smokers should be banned from suing them, thus forever absolving cigarette companies from future culpability. Sort of a Joe Camel Witness Protection Program.
Since it would require an Act of Congress to offer protection from lawsuits, the door could open for a variety of eager penitents. Devoted Catholic Mafia families could offer to build cathedrals in exchange for eternal absolution for all sins committed. Doctors facing malpractice suits could set up a fund to compensate in sliding scale amounts for specified botched surgeries, in return for immunity from lawsuits in perpetuity.
One very sticky point in the negotiations is whether or not the Food & Drug Administration would obtain the right to regulate nicotine levels, or [gasp] ban tobacco altogether. This is, of course, behind the industry's determination to deny any inherent harm in cigarettes which, without nicotine, would be about as much fun to smoke as bean sprouts.
Cigarettes, the president of RJ Reynolds testified under oath last week, are no more addictive than carrots. He didn't mention what the research leading to this interesting comparison had to say about the effect of nicotine on eyesight, but even in desperation there is no way I would consider smoking a carrot.
For any reformed, but eternally addicted, smoker, this entire business can tax shaky resolve to the limit. Compare it to in-depth discussions of food around dieters, or inviting AA members to hold their meetings in a Johnny Walker distillery.
For those of us whose reformations tend to unravel at the first sniff of secondhand smoke, all this talk about cigarettes is like passing a 50-pound box of See's under a chocoholic's nose. And, now, 4 miserable years since I last inhaled, I can't pick up a newspaper without being reminded that regardless of all warnings, I would still grasp at any rationale to start smoking again.
So are the cigarette companies telling me that if I do, they'll pick up the tab when lung cancer strikes? Hold everything; this is a tough decision.
The tobacco industry would like us to think they want to turn over a new leaf.
Unfortunately,
the leaf is still tobacco.
© sonya
hammond 1997