In my lifetime (55 years and hopefully a few more to go), New Zealand has seen a complete change in attitudes to smoking. I grew up in a society where most people smoked (including my parents and my adolescent self) and where smoking was part of the very fabric of daily life. Saturation advertising was part of that. Non-smokers were the odd ones out. Not any more, I’m pleased to report. The percentage of New Zealanders who smoke has been dramatically reduced to a hard core of no more than a quarter of the population.

However, it is a very different story for Maori. Tobacco addiction is one of the most insidious lingering evils of European colonisation. To mark World Smokefree Day on May 31, Te Reo Marama (the Maori Smokefree Coalition) ran a full page newspaper ad in the ChristchurchStar (29/5/06). I’d be interested to know how many other papers ran it, because it used extremely strong language against large and powerful transnational corporations (TNCs).

“Maori Murder. Have you heard how the tobacco industry kills Maori? RIP. Here are the facts:

• Tobacco is the single biggest killer of Maori.
• It accounts for a third of all Maori deaths.
• That means higher rates of lung cancer, heart disease, cot death.
• Respiratory infections, glue ear, meningococcal disease and diabetes.
• Almost one in two Maori smoke. That’s way higher than any other group in the country.

It’s legal genocide”.

Apology From Philip Morris CEO To Maori

The Maori Smokefree Coalition hasn’t confined its bombardment of the tobacco TNCs to the isolated safety of New Zealand. In April 2006, two of its representatives went into the belly of the beast, namely the annual shareholders’ meeting of the gigantic Philip Morris corporation, in New Jersey, USA. They went there with a specific complaint – that, in 2005, the company had sold a brand of cigarettes in Israel called “Maori Mix”, featuring Maori designs and a map of New Zealand (Maori designs are being used on all manner of international products, but this takes the exploitation of the “exotic” to a new and very cynical low, considering what the tobacco companies have done to Maori). And, to the astonishment of American and international tobacco control campaigners, they emerged with a public apology from the Chief Executive Officer of Altria, Philip Morris’ parent company, who said that it had been a “mistake” and that the Maori designs had been withdrawn in 2005.

Shane Bradbrook, the Coalition Director, said: “ Maori will accept the apology, but we can't accept that it's a mistake. They spend millions of dollars and they never make mistakes. It's always on purpose…Really I didn't care about getting an apology, it was more about fronting up to them. It's a win for Maori and all the New Zealanders who have been supporting us. It's a huge win”…

“In the statement Mr Bradbrook read out to Altria shareholders and management, he said he was there to represent Maori, whose culture had been used to sell tobacco products. ‘Let me tell you, this product called Maori Mix was an absolute affront to my people. Your company's misappropriation and exploitation of our culture to sell your product of death and illness to Israelis was at a minimum culturally insensitive – and at worst another form of oppression and abuse that indigenous peoples have faced for decades. I stand before you to hold you in absolute contempt and derision. I don't expect a weak apology or some glib rationale from you for associating our culture with Maori Mix. But I do have a message for you: do not misrepresent, do not associate our proud culture with your deceitful practices and product’" (Stuff Website, “Tobacco giant apologises to Maori”, 28/4/06).

Hone Harawira Launches Campaign For SmokeFree NZ By 2010

Maori are the vanguard in taking the fight to the tobacco TNCs. To mark World Smokefree Day, Maori Party MP, Hone Harawira, launched a campaign to have New Zealand smokefree by 2010. A reformed smoker for 15 years, he emphasised that his campaign was not aimed at smokers (who must be feeling distinctly picked on by now) but at the tobacco TNCs “and the poison they sell us…But it’s not just about Maori either – tobacco kills 4,500 Kiwis every year. If that were any other product, it would be banned tomorrow” (Press, 1/6/06; “MP wants NZ to be smokefree by 2010”). Harawira announced that he would be introducing a Bill to make the production, manufacture and sale of tobacco products illegal. He spelled out his case against the tobacco TNCs in a Perspective article in the Press (7/6/06, “Make NZ smokefree by 2010”).

“The other day I came across a litter of cigarette butts outside of Parliament – Pall Mall, Horizon, rollies and a host of others. As I counted them, it was like counting coffins, and it occurred to me that it would not be long before one of those coffins would be for one of my Parliamentary colleagues. British American Tobacco (BAT), which sells most tobacco products in New Zealand and around the world, is counting too, but it does not count coffins as I do – it counts customers instead.

“BAT says its customers drive everything it does, and its Chief Executive, Paul Adams, says that while its products pose risks to health, and the industry can be seen as controversial, they are legal and calls for prohibition are rare. It seems that having more than a billion people smoking these cancerous products is not enough, because BAT is hunting for new markets all the time. Well, I have launched a fight against companies such as this, and against men such as Adams. I do so with the support of many others who have already offered their help, and on behalf of the more than two million other Kiwis who want this poison out of Aotearoa…

“…Tobacco has had its day in America and Europe and now companies such as BAT are looking for other places to conquer in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and China. They are colonising places even America can’t get into…In their targeting of the poor, the indigenous and the young, tobacco companies prove that they are no different from any other agency of oppression. These tobacco companies are owned by people driven by a lust for profit. They have no conscience about selling a product that kills our people, and in case you don’t believe me, here is a quote from a tobacco public relations man: ‘We don’t smoke this shit. We reserve the right to sell it to the young, the poor, the black and the stupid’

“I have set a goal to get tobacco companies out of this country by December 10, 2010…And the best idea I have heard to date is that we present awards to people for all their positive work in helping stop tobacco deaths in Aotearoa. The idea is that the awards run for five years, and that on World Smokefree Day 2011, we issue an award to the nation of Aotearoa for our great work in ridding our society of this disease, once and for all”. Of course, not only is Harawira taking on the tobacco TNCs but also the Government, which does very nicely out of taxation revenue from tobacco sales, one of the most reliable of the so-called “sin taxes” (booze and gambling being the others, and presumably prostitution, now that it has been legalised).

Dead Tobacco Addict’s Family Loses Case

BAT is, of course, very familiar to Watchdog readers. Although never a Roger Award winner (not yet anyway), it has been a regular finalist and runner up. It would seem that Hone Harawira’s all out war on the tobacco TNCs stands a better chance of success than the strategy of waging single battles through the courts on behalf of individual dead tobacco addicts. In the US, the tobacco TNCs have had civil court damages in the hundreds of billions of dollars awarded against them in class action suits on behalf of affected smokers. But in New Zealand, the only court action yet brought on behalf of a tobacco addict ended in victory for WD & HO Wills and its owner, BAT New Zealand. Janice Pou of Invercargill smoked 30 cigarettes a day since 1968, and died of lung cancer in 2002, aged 51. Before she died she brought a claim for $310,966 damages against BAT and Wills; her two children continued it after her death.

But, in May 2006, the four year case ended in victory for the tobacco TNCs, with Justice Lang ruling that: “Even if Mrs Pou was not aware of the dangers of smoking in 1968, she must have been aware of those risks by 1974 at the latest. Thereafter she elected to keep smoking and did not take reasonable steps to quit despite having the ability to do so” (Press, 4/5/06; “Family loses tobacco suit”). So it’s apparently the addict’s fault for not kicking the addiction. Now I personally know that it is possible to give up smoking, as was proved by both my late father and my wife who, between them, were smokers for decades. But equally the very point of selling cigarettes is as a delivery vehicle for highly addictive nicotine and that nicotine addiction is, by definition, a very, very hard one to shake.

Regulate Market Forces; Treat It Like Heroin; Scare Tactics

Not all tobacco control groups support Harawira’s campaign for a ban. For example, Action on Smoking and Health’s ( ASH) Director, Becky Freeman, wrote (Smokefree Times, April 2006; “To Ban Or Not To Ban: Is That The Question?”): “Well, I don’t think the solution is quite that easy… First and foremost however, tobacco use is a health and social justice issue and not one for the Police and courts to manage on their own…To me the real question isn’t whether or not we should make the sale and supply of tobacco illegal, the real question is how can we get smoking rates low enough so that the sale and supply of tobacco is no longer a profitable industry. The tobacco industry makes billions of dollars by killing their best customers. They must not be allowed to continue to do so.

“Instead, ASH proposes that we need immediate action to regulate the free market that the tobacco industry currently enjoys. Removing control of the sale, supply, marketing, and product development from the hands of the industry and putting it into the hands of public health will go a long way towards eliminating the death and disease due to tobacco use. This way, tobacco companies are no longer purely motivated by profit, as in a corporate model, but are motivated by public health goals with a clear timeline of permanently ‘going out of business’…”.

On a similar line, leading Wellington health researchers, George Thomson and Nick Wilson, have called for tobacco to be made available only through a non-profit supply system like that used for the heroin substitute methadone, thus treating tobacco exactly the same as the deadliest of the illegal drugs (for George Thomson and Nick Wilson’s earlier work, see Jeremy Agar’s review of their “The Tobacco Industry In New Zealand: A Case Study Of The Behaviour of Multinational Companies”, in Watchdog 101, December 2002. It can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/01/08.htm).

Yet another, more time honoured, approach is to scare the shit out of smokers. In May the Government announced that it is considering putting graphic images of rotting gums and teeth, throat cancer and gangrenous feet on cigarette packets. Damien O’Connor, Associate Minister of Health, said: “In a country where we pride ourselves on our outdoor healthy options, our smoking rate remains alarmingly high” (10/5/06, press release; “Graphic warnings on the horizon for smokers”). In New Zealand 24% of people smoke as opposed to 19% in Australia. Introducing these gruesome images onto cigarette packets is not optional for New Zealand but an obligation under its membership of the groundbreaking Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). NZ ratified this international treaty in 2005 and thus has to fully comply with its health warnings requirements by early 2008. The FCTC is the first international treaty pushed through by the World Health Organisation and it was driven to fruition by the international Network for Accountability of Tobacco Transnationals, of which CAFCA is proud to have been a member, albeit very much a token one. Watchdog reported on the progress of the FCTC for years (most recently in “Landmark Tobacco Control Treaty Now In Force” in 109, August 2005, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/09/05.htm). Now it is up to the signatory States, such as New Zealand, to make it work.

Merchants Of Death Always Looking For A New Sales Gimmick

Not that the tobacco TNCs are in any danger of going broke just yet. BAT NZ paid its British parent a dividend of nearly $147 million in 2004, which it attributes to the brand loyalty of its customers. Plus these merchants of death and disease are always looking for new profitable ways to peddle their drug – the very high price of packets of readymade cigarettes has led to a proportional increase in sales of roll your own smokes. And they are pushing for NZ to lift its ban on snus – ground tobacco similar to snuff which is contained in a packet like a miniature teabag. Users place the packet between their upper lip and gum and absorb the nicotine through the mucous membranes of the mouth. On one hand it eliminates smoke but on the other, it delivers nicotine directly into the user’s system, making it highly addictive. The Ministry of Health says that there is no current intention to review the legal ban on snus.

There are is no shortage of suggestions on how to deal with the plague of tobacco addiction. CAFCA as such does not have a policy - one of the advantages of not being a political party - and a discussion on the subject led to a range of responses from the committee (which includes one veteran heavy smoker who has given up very recently). But invoking editorial privilege, and speaking strictly personally, I’m with Hone. Ban the bastards, put them out of business, close them down, extinguish the smoke. Treat them like the drug dealers and criminals that they are. New Zealand led the world in going nuclear free, so let’s keep up the good work and lead it in becoming smokefree.