APACT 2013 in Chiba, Japan: Ending the Tobacco Epidemic

Reposting my report on the recent 10th Asia Pacific Association for the Control of Tobacco (APACT) Conference in Chiba, Japan.  This was first published on the BMJ Tobacco Control Journal blog:
http://blogs.bmj.com/tc/2013/08/29/reports-from-the-asia-pacific-association-for-the-control-of-tobacco-apact2013-conference/

The Asia Pacific Association for the Control of Tobacco (APACT) marked a milestone with its 10^th APACT Conference in Chiba, Japan last 18-21 August 2013, with a record 785 delegates from 42 nations participating.

In his David Yen Memorial Lecture, Mr. Kyoichi Miyazaki traced the conference’s history back to the visionary advocates who contributed to APACT’s establishment in 1989 and its early years of growth (particularly David Yen, Ted Chen, Judith Mackay, Prakit Vathesatogkit, Gregory Connolly, Richard Daynard, Terry Pechacek, Takeshi Hirayama, David Sweanor, Nigel Gray, Martin Kawano, and Kwan-Mo Chung, among others) in response to pressure to open the Asian markets to United States (US) tobacco companies wishing to invade the region.

Dr. Judith Mackay immediately followed up with a forward-looking plenary lecture on the tobacco endgame in line with the conference theme “Ending the Tobacco Epidemic – Protecting and Keeping Healthy Lives”, and over the next few days, best practices for measures to reduce tobacco consumption, such as optimal tobacco taxation, cost-effective cessation, and smoke-free policy advocacy, were discussed in plenary sessions, symposia, and poster presentations. Particular recognition was given to Australia for legislating the world’s first plain packaging of tobacco products, to Thailand for standing up to Big Tobacco’s intimidation by litigation for requiring the world’s largest (85%) pictorial health warnings, and to New Zealand for trendsetting a 2025 endgame target.

In contrast, the conference also recognized the varying degrees of tobacco control implementation in individual countries and underscored the need for full and accelerated FCTC implementation across our region in order to slow the tobacco death clock. Indonesia, for example, remains the only Asian country not a party to the FCTC, and conference host, Japan, still has no national law to protect the public from secondhand smoke. In this regard, delegates and speakers also shared experiences relating to the increasing incidence and overtness of tobacco industry interference in public policy (e.g. through their so-called Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities, litigation against effective tobacco regulation, and stakeholder engagement in international trade policies) and called on governments to immediately and fully implement FCTC Article 5.3 and its guidelines, to ban CSR activities by the industry, and to explicitly exclude tobacco products from international, regional, and bilateral trade and investment agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement currently being negotiated, noting that, except for the US, all TPP negotiators are Parties to the FCTC.

The 10th APACT further recognized the importance of the youth as future leaders who must be meaningfully engaged to realize the tobacco endgame in the Asia Pacific region, because just as in 1989, continuing collaboration is needed to overcome Big Tobacco, which relentlessly targets young people of Asia for its profits.

The next APACT Conference will be in 2016 in Qingdao, China.

APACT declaration and statements here: http://www.apact.jp/conference_statements.html

Tobacco Companies Can NEVER Be Socially Responsible

Philip Morris Philippines donates to the Philippine National Red Cross, the Philippine Band of Mercy, the Jaime Ongpin Foundation, ABS-CBN Knowledge Channel,  as well as a whole number of other entities in the guise of their so-called "corporate social responsibility".  British American Tobacco (BAT) has an annual CSR report.  Lucio Tan also does the same through his foundation.

What's wrong with donating one million pesos to typhoon victims, donating a new school building or hospital, helping paint classrooms, planting trees, and providing ambulances?  Technically, nothing.  These are good works that benefit people.  But what if we were to dig deeper and discover that the doer of all this good was a tobacco company?  That changes everything.

How can a company that makes, promotes, and sells a product that causes so much disease, suffering, and death, think that by giving away a few million pesos at a time, it can make up for its products' many harms or "buy back" the lives and quality of life that it destroyed?  I'm sorry: hindi nabibili ang buhay ng tao.

At the same time that it is donating a few million pesos from its billions in annual profits (and wantonly promoting its "charitable work"), it fights tobacco tax increases that can raise many more billions for the government.  Idiots! We don't want your loose change.  Without complaining, let the government raise taxes high enough so that there is enough government revenue to fund health, education, and other social programs, while making cigarettes less affordable to our youth and the poor who cannot afford to get sick with a tobacco-related disease.

These gestures of charity and apparent responsibility are ultimately geared towards improving the tarnished reputations of tobacco companies, buying social acceptability, and neutralizing the industry's opposition from the public health community.  Tobacco companies will do anything (yes, anything) to make a profit and please their shareholders, including lying, cheating, and threatening to sue ministries of health.

If a tobacco company was really sincere about being socially responsible, it would:
- stop fighting effective tobacco tax increases
- tell the truth about tobacco harms by printing pictorial health warnings
- stop all advertising, promotion, and sponsorship, especially for activities aimed at young people
- stop denying the harms of second-hand smoke and fighting bans on smoking in public places
- stop making and selling tobacco products and shift to a different product

If you're interested, here's a good report on the truth behind BAT New Zealand's CSR:
http://www.oxygeneve.ch/docs/bat-nz-trust-us-we're-socially-responsible.pdf


Also see "Trust Us, we're the tobacco industry":
http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/campaign/global/framework/docs/TrustUs.pdf

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The truth about Philip Morris's Youth Smoking Prevention (YSP) program

This was an article I wrote many years ago but remains relevant to this day in the face of the tobacco companies' so-called corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs.  Give me a break!  How can a tobacco company ever be "socially responsible"?  It is their IRresponsibility that is the cause of disease, disability, and death of millions of people around the world, not counting the social, economic, and environmental harms of tobacco.

We Don't Want Youths to Smoke Our "Risky" Product by Ulysses Dorotheo, 27 November 2001

Philip Morris is quick to boast that it is "actively involved in more than 130 programs in nearly 70 countries to help prevent youth smoking". One example it cites is in the Philippines, implemented together with the University of Asia and the Pacific (UAP), entitled, "I am STRONG…I am Responsible." The program, it alleges, was even endorsed by the Secretary of the Department of Education, Culture, and Sports under the previous (Estrada) government administration. According to Philip Morris, "the program's specific objective is to cultivate strength and courage among the students so that they can make responsible decisions on a variety of lifestyle issues, including smoking." A review of the program, however, reveals that for the duration of the program, high school students are indeed taught various human virtues geared toward making "responsible decisions", but that is all.

There is NO mention of the many deleterious consequences of smoking on health. There is NO mention of nicotine addiction. There is NO mention of the effects of second-hand smoke. Thus like other youth smoking prevention (YSP) programs of the tobacco industry, it is a sham. In fact, only two brief sentences in the entire program refer to smoking: "There are decisions that teenagers can make and decisions that are properly adult. For instance, smoking and drinking are adult decisions. Hence, children and youth should not smoke." Quite obviously, by labeling the decision to smoke as an "adult choice", it reinforces the wrong idea that in order to be more adult (which youths aspire to be), youths should smoke. Therefore, instead of preventing youth smoking, it actually promotes it. It also implies that smoking is harmful to youths, but it is safe if one is an adult. A conversation with the former dean of the UAP College of Education reveals even more: Philip Morris only provides funding for the program. The course content and actual implementation are purely a UAP effort. Philip Morris officials don't deny this, yet they claim that their company is "actively involved". Talk about genuine concern… Philip Morris refuses to receive any feedback on the program, supposedly so that it will not know the mindset of the program participants. Of course, we all know that any such feedback would show how ineffective it is as a YSP program. The program was started in 1998 and was supposed to end this year. Philip Morris Philippines had decided not to continue the program, but the decision from higher up (Philip Morris Asia) was to renew the contract with UAP for another 3 years. Since Philip Morris has no idea as to the (in)effectiveness of the program, its willingness to continue funding the program can only be interpreted as another public relations gimmick to help polish its tarnished image. Fortunately, the new Secretary of Education, Secretary Raul Roco, has refused outright any and all offers that Philip Morris has been making in recent months. [2010 Addendum: The new DepEd Secretary Bro. Armin Luistro would do well to steer clear of the machinations of Philip Morris and other tobacco companies.]