TY - JOUR T1 - Turkey: the trade–health divide JF - Tobacco Control JO - Tob Control SP - 204 LP - 204 DO - 10.1136/tc.10.3.204e VL - 10 IS - 3 A2 - , Y1 - 2001/09/01 UR - http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/10/3/204.6.abstract N2 - Despite Turkey's steady transition from relative poverty and isolation to a modern European nation, it still retains some of its old image. In this country on the join of Europe and Asia, still occasionally emanating more than a whiff of its past mystery, when its Ottoman court ruled over a great empire, all is not always as it seems. Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent history of tobacco, as recorded in several past issues of this journal. Its model tobacco control legislation has repeatedly been the target of attempts to circumvent the total advertising ban it contains. The growth of a strong and active health coalition is more than matched by increasingly subversive measures to establish Formula One motor sport, apparently for the sole purpose of illicit tobacco promotion. It is possibly the unlikely success of health interests, in a country where the international tobacco industry must have least expected serious opposition, that has pushed the tobacco industry's counter offensives deeper underground.In April, the minister of culture officially opened the newly restored building that housed Turkey's first modern parliament, dating from 1923, a place of great reverence for Turkish people and akin to a national monument to the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Who had paid for the highly costly restoration? Philip Morris, a public company that does not spend … ER -