The New Straits Times, July 30, 2000
By Prof. Dzulkifli Abdul Razak
Major tobacco companies were claiming that "they would go bankrupt if forced to pay out the multi-billion-dollar fines sought by plaintiffs in a landmark class-action suit on behalf of 300,000 to 700,000 ill smokers in the state of Florida" (NST, July 14).
Earlier in 1991, 60,000 nonsmoking flight attendants on U.S. airlines claimed that breathing smoke in airplane cabins gave them cancer and a host of other diseases. They filed a class action suit and was awarded millions of dollars.
This time the unprecedented verdict delivered by a Florida jury ordered the tobacco industry to pay a staggering sum of $145 billion (RM 551 billion) in punitive damages to smokers. The two-year trial reportedly heard testimony from 157 witnesses filling 58,000 pages.
An attorney of one of the company said, "A punishment is to let them know what they did was wrong and guide them, not for vengeance, not for destroying them". It seems the company he represented "already owes more money that it has assets". Allegedly it could not continue to operate.
Another attorney called the trial outcome "an unfair procedure".
These are interesting comments from a conglomerate industry better known as "Big Tobacco". A industry that has all along use "unfair" advantages and misleading information over the innocent public, has suddenly deem fit to raise the question of "destruction" and "fairness".
That the industry has "destroyed" so many lives and insisting of the right to sell the "killer product" through various indirect advertising tactics (Poison Control, July 2) is of no consequence. What is "fair" to the industry then and even now, has all along been "unfair" to most (except perhaps their shareholders), especially in many parts the developing world. Despite the stringent rulings and tight regulations imposed on the industry in the developed world, the industry still practises double standards in many developing countries. Is this "fair"?
Especially in Malaysia, many are still victims of tobacco-brand advertising in places and dimensions that are not longer allowed in the developed countries to where the industry plough back most of its economic gains.
Is it "fair" to take advantage of a situation, just because there is an opportunity to do so, even though it is morally wrong? Or just because there is a lack of political will to act, as the industry so often implied?
It is "fair" for the industry to hide information about the dangers of tobacco by not labelling accurately the myraid of hazards tobacco can cause?
Is it "fair" to hype brands after brands of "defective and dangerous" products as though it is the status symbols of a healthy lifestyles?
If the answers are "no" - then why the cry of being "unfair" now? Is it because this time the industry is forced to its knee, and felt vulnerable enough to beg for another lease of life?
Indeed, the tobacco industry likened the multibillion-dollar verdict as a "death warrant". Is it the product they have been peddling all along not in itself a "death warrant" - by duping the consumers despite the many global call to cease doing so? "Tobacco kills - Don't be duped" was the slogan adopted by World Health Organization (WHO) in the recent World No-Tobacco Day. Is'nt this testimony enough!
As reiterated by the chief lawyer for the plaintiffs, "the tobacco industry has gotten their way for the last half-century...The day of reckoning is late in coming." Too many "death warrants" have been issued, knowingly, by the industry for far too long. At least 10 million more is expected to pick up their death warrant by the year 2020.
The industry should be last to complain about its state of affairs in the face of such a verdict. Ironically, there is not a sigh of regret when they reaped billions of profits. There was not a whimper of remorse when statistics after statistics, scientifically backed, being churned out to show that tobacco is hazardous; that tobacco causes immense ill-health to millions throughout the world. Instead, one could still vividly recall how the CEOs of several tobacco companies tool oath testifying that tobacco is in fact "safe" - sometime likening it to a candy!
Even of late, the industry is still attempting to create what it termed as a safer cigarette. It spend billions attempting to develop a "healthy" cigarette of sort that still "tastes good". Unlike traditional cigarettes, which are lit and then burn down to the filter as smokers inhale, the "safer" type heats tobacco wrapped around a carbon core down the centre of the cigarette.
Will we be treated with another list of misleading promises of how safe the habits of smoking is? Is this going to be a truly fair deal as far as health hazards are concern? By now we all have a fair idea of how reliable the tobacco industry's claims on health effects of cigarettes have been.
To quote the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, "What we do know is that cigarettes and other tobacco products in any form are unsafe, dangerous, and cause great pain, suffering and death". Smokers should be very careful about any claims of a so-called "safer" cigarettes.
Already some sectors are citing ethical issues as to whether or not the new device is actually a drug (more specifically, nicotine) delivery system rather than a cigarette per se. And as such should it not be stringently regulated as all other medical products?
To date, reportedly, the claim is based on a massive uncontrolled study involving some smoking population as subjects in the US. No public review board has approved the study, let alone its sale as an over-the-counter drug.
Others said that the plans to market a "safer" cigarette is taking advantage of the regulation gap created by the US Supreme Court's ruling that the Food and Drug Administration does not have the power to regulate tobacco. After all this is the same tobacco company which was ordered by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last year to stop the totally misleading advertising campaign for one its products. The suggestion that the product had no additives, thereby making it somehow more healthy and less dangerous to smoke, is deemed to be misleading.
The company was then forced by FTC to add a package label making it clear that there are no health benefits from smoking the particular brand of cigarette.
In short, as long as the tobacco industry could exploit the situation to its advantage, the question of "fairness" does not arise, regardless of what the toll is on innocent lives. The industry will continue to sustain the smoking culture under whatever guise and by whatever means possible as its internal documents tend to suggest.
Hence, if it has to be "unfair" and signing the "death warrant" that would help create a tobacco-free society, and save more lives, so be it. The point remains, the tobacco industry must be made to taste its own bitter lessons on what being fair is all about.
