Industry collaboration

“We cannot continue allowing hatred and disdain towards tobacco companies to interfere with and trump efforts to achieve our fundamental goal of rapidly reducing the leading cause of disease, disability and death (i.e. cigarettes). Its daily cigarette smoking that is killing millions of people, not nicotine, tobacco, or tobacco companies.”

Bill Godshall, Pennsylvania

Mr. Godshall’s exemplary missive conveniently ignores the fact that daily cigarette smoking would not occur were it not for addictive nicotine. Nicotine is inherent to tobacco. Tobacco use would not be prevalent were it not for tobacco companies, and tobacco companies would not market nicotine were it not for the profit.

Our esteemed colleague, Dr. K. H. Ginzel has noted that harm reduction is analogous to Allied forces negotiating w Hitler on the beaches of Normandy for how many lives we can accommodate for the Nazis to remain in power. Collaboration, whether complicit or duplicate, is still culpable.

It most certainly is the tobacco companies that are killing people. Tobacco has not been a benign weed on the side of the road for 400 years. Without the predatory capitalist promotion of an addictive deadly product there would be no pandemic. To assume that tobacco companies are going to rectify this with new nicotine products is ludicrous.

We already have ‘harm reduction’ policies proven to reduce the harm of prevalent use: taxes, tobacco free space, and marketing reform. And criminal proceedings for corporate executives seems promising. The best we can hope for with Reynolds, or any tobacco company, in producing NRT products is a perpetuation of the misdirection that warranted a federal conviction in a U.S. court for fraud and racketeering. A corporations’ only obligation is to profit and the tobacco industry’s profit is incompatible with the public health.

One of the best gauges of the effectiveness of tobacco free advocacy is how the industry behaves. This dubious flirtation with NRT and the incredibly overhyped E cigarette should do little more than question the efficacy of either to actually reduce use. The tobacco industry has had decades to reduce the harm they cause and have responded with fraud, smuggling, endless litigation, manipulation of policies and politicians, and an ever increasing mortality rate in the developing world.

An alliance with the tobacco industry is just that. Don’t expect any applause.