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Change Your Life! |
Global ad ban on tobacco sought by WHO |
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June 1, 2000
"The tobacco industry seeks 11,000 new smokers every day to replace those that die," said Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, director-general of the WHO. "And they succeed."
The WHO said it would make a global ban on advertising a priority in a Framework Convention on Tobacco Control that will be negotiated by its 191 member states.
Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway, signaled WHO's intentions on World No-Tobacco Day in Bangkok. She lashed out at multinational companies for targeting children in their marketing strategies.
To promote its campaign, the U.N. agency has issued a Marlboro Man-style poster worldwide. It shows two cowboys on horseback, with the caption: "Bob, I've got cancer."
"Tobacco is a communicable disease," Brundtland told a news conference after meeting Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai. "It's communicated through advertising, marketing and making smoking appear admirable and glamorous."
In a statement, she accused the tobacco industry of using sports and entertainment figures to market its products to youngsters, or through product placement in films and videos.
The statement said it was hard "to find any parallel in history where people who have gone about in such a systematic way perpetuating death and destruction have gone unpunished and unquestioned."
She said that 10 million people a year will be dying from tobacco-related deaths a year by 2030, more than 70 percent of them from the developing world, a swelling market for tobacco companies.
Currently, the figure is 3.5 million to 4 million. According to the WHO, 1.15 billion of the world's 6 billion people smoke. Growing numbers are women and children.
No-Tobacco Day was marked across the globe, but Thailand was chosen for the launch because of the success of local anti-smoking advocates who won a ban on tobacco advertising in 1992.
In Bangkok, about 10,000 people marched and sang anti-tobacco songs and started a clock representing one death worldwide every eight seconds from tobacco-related disease.
China, where 320 million people smoke, announced it will draw up a national tobacco-control plan to reduce smoking-related health problems and economic losses, said a state-run newspaper, the Beijing Morning Post.
In India, a former New Delhi health minister who in 1998 got smoking banned in public areas of the capital urged the prime minister to treat tobacco as the country's leading health problem.
"Fighting against tobacco can no longer be taken as a controlled program but as war," said Dr. Harsh Vardhan. "We have to fight for its total elimination."
In Spain, 16 throat cancer associations filed the first collective legal suit against tobacco producers.
They are seeking an undisclosed amount of financial compensation for 4,339 sufferers from three tobacco companies in Spain, including Altadis, the world's biggest cigar maker and sixth-largest cigarette company.
The tobacco industry came to its own defense on the eve of No-Tobacco Day. David Wilson, regional manager of corporate affairs for British-American Tobacco, which has a 15 percent share of the global cigarette market, denied WHO's contention that advertising targets children.
Wilson said in an interview Tuesday that BAT acknowledged that smoking caused fatal diseases. He advised smokers to limit themselves to a "sustainable habit" - which he claimed would be 10 cigarettes a day.
Wilson complained that the industry was being "locked out" of negotiations on the planned Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which will consider the global advertising ban.
Brundtland said that tobacco companies would be given the chance to put their case to the WHO in Geneva in October. She praised Thailand for responding "forcibly" 10 years ago when it came under pressure - particularly from the United States - to open its markets to foreign tobacco.
Thailand was eventually forced to open to imports, but the trade spat created momentum for the Thai anti-tobacco campaign. The number of Thai men who smoke has fallen 10 percent in the past 13 years.
Health Minister Korn Dabbaransi said the events had made Thailand "the loser in trade but the winner in health."
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