In its continuing effort to win a prize for "Most shameless distortion of the facts on smoking", Germany's Reemtsma has submitted another entry in Poland. This billboard ad is the first to show so much of the youthful flesh behind which tobacco executives hide.¹ But like all promotions of the addictive product that kills half the people who use it, this one is much more interesting for what it does not expose than for what it does.

To those familiar with 1999 political debates in Poland, this particular "Test the West" imagery was clearly designed to ridicule efforts to ban tobacco advertising and promotion. Ironically, it was Reemtsma and other tobacco transnationals that were trying desperately to keep pernicious Western trends out of Polandespecially declining cigarette consumption and increasing marketing restrictions.

This otherwise revealing ad fails to point out that:

• the Westthat is, the European Unionadopted a complete . . . [Full text of this article]