THEhe tobacco industry has always excelled at marketing. After decades of marketing a notoriously dangerous product using stereotypes of stylish, trendy people or avid adventurers for the great outdoors, the tobacco companies are changing strategy, but not method. They still rely on reassuring and seductive messages to maximize their profits, but now it’s to promise a world without… cigarettes.
The managing director of Philip Morris International, Jacek Olczak, thus called a few days ago the public authorities to adopt for cigarettes the same approach as for heat engines in the automobile industry, namely, to ban them in the long term. “The sooner it happens, the better it will be for everyone”, explained Mr. Olczak to Telegraph, who thinks that within ten years the problem can be solved ” once for all “, the idea being to impose on the market substitute products consisting of heating tobacco and no longer consuming it, which would reduce the harmful effects.
Besides the fact that this observation has been scientifically challenged in 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO), the proposed delay is indecent in view of the damage caused by cigarettes. If the ban were to see the light of day within ten years, tobacco would have time to kill 70 million people. The tobacco companies can no longer decently deny that their product is harmful, the sector has lost several resounding lawsuits against tobacco victims, its economic model is attacked from all sides by public health policies and we should accept without flinching. still for ten years?
Sell a poison and its antidote
The cynicism of these companies is limitless. Philip Morris has just caused a controversy by announcing the buyout of Vectura for 1.16 billion euros, a pharmaceutical group that manufactures inhalers for asthma and chronic lung disease. You had to think about selling a poison and an antidote capable of mitigating its effects! Shamelessly, the tobacco industry presents itself as the solution to a problem, for which it is responsible by promoting a product, admittedly legal, but known to be potentially fatal.
“Tobacco is the leading cause of cancer and the first modifiable public health problem, recalls Jean-David Zeitoun, doctor in clinical epidemiology. It is estimated that around 1.5 billion people smoked in 2020. These smokers can expect to live around nine years less than non-smokers ”, he emphasizes in his book published in May, La Grande Extension: history of human health (Denoël, 338 pages, 21 euros). “Smoking leads to a shorter and less good life. This burden has no equivalent and yet tobacco still lives and it even lives very well. The market grows by 3% per year and generates 50 billion dollars in profits each year ”, he insists.
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