FCTC: how will they keep pushing?

More clues are emerging about how, apart from using Formula One and a few other high profile renegades, tobacco companies think they can keep on promoting their brands as increasing numbers of countries adopt comprehensive tobacco control laws under the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). In those without existing or effective legislation, of course, an obvious first line of action is to lobby hard to ensure that any new legislation introduced is ineffective. Japan leads the way here, with the ministry of finance, not the health ministry, formulating Japan’s response to the FCTC, due to its status as guardian of the government’s controlling interest in Japan Tobacco (JT).

In such pushover conditions, it is not surprising to find proposed new health warnings for industry apologists to die for, with misleading texts such as “Smoking could be one of the causes of lung cancer for you”, and sentences mentioning “epidemiological studies” which are guaranteed to bore or bamboozle and, seeing it is proposed that the warnings cover only 30% of the pack, be hard …