Big Tobacco

Example of the tobacco industry targeting women

Big Tobacco is a name used to refer to the largest companies in the tobacco industry. According to the World Medical Journal, the five largest tobacco companies are: Philip Morris International, Japan Tobacco, British American Tobacco, Imperial Brands, and China Tobacco. These companies have substantial power economically, with revenues matching some small countries. These companies are well known for lobbying governments, advocating for looser restrictions and lower taxes.

These companies have garnered significant controversy for the product they produce and the tactics with which they sell and market them. Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the United States. Despite a general decrease in cigarette use in the United States, there has been no change in the use of smokeless tobacco which can also cause cancer.

Some of the tactics utilized by these companies have been noted to be similar to that of other industries such as the oil, sugar, and cell phone industries.

These companies are controversial due to the negative health effects of the products they produce, and attempts to misinform on this topic. In the United States, the big five tobacco companies have worked together to conceal scientific evidence on the negative effects of tobacco. There is also a history of manipulating and destroying evidence.

The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control was designed by the World Health Assembly as an international legal approach to reducing the effect of tobacco on public health. However, its implementation has also been interfered with by these tobacco companies. Tobacco companies have also been known to foster relations with governments and communities to maintain loose regulations on tobacco products.

In recent years, Big Tobacco appear to be responding to moves by the World Health Organisation to increase public participation in health policy formulation.

In 2024 in the UK, for example, there was some controversy over the appointment of a former Philip Morris International employee Andrew Cave as a trustee of a UK charity The Involve Foundation. Involve’s aim is to increase democratic participation of ordinary people and organises citizens’ assemblies with government bodies and other civil society organisations to formulate policy, including health policy. The appointment of a trustee who worked in an industry associated with one of the leading causes of death in the world is seen as a conflict of interest. Cave was Head of Communications at Philip Morris International (PMI) from 2012 to 2022. During this time, he was involved in their push to subvert the World Health Organization's global anti-smoking treaty. After leaving PMI, he continued to work alongside other former PMI lobbyists at So What Communications.

This appointment of a former PMI employee to a UK civil society organisation operating in the public participation space must be seen in the context of World Health Organization moves to increase participation of ordinary citizens in health policy formulation. In line with a growing global trend, as documented by the OECD and established at the EU, the WHO has embraced increased public participation in health policymaking. This is in alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other intergovernmental agreements, and means "empowering people, communities and civil society through inclusive participation in decision-making processes that affect health across the policy cycle and at all levels of the system."

The WHO’s move to increase public participation could explain why, at around the same time as he became trustee at Involve, Cave also became a director of another non-profit operating in the deliberative democracy field, the Sortition Foundation. This constitutes a notable concentration of tobacco industry influence, since Involve and the Sortition Foundation are the two main providers of public participation services in the UK, and both have clients in the healthcare sector. It undermines trust in the outcome of deliberations on health policy organised by them, especially in view of recent moves by the UK government to strengthen anti-smoking regulations, which the tobacco industry, including PMI, has campaigned fiercely against.

The UK government’s Chief Medical Officer Prof. Chris Whitty, who has called for politicians to push back against this tobacco industry lobbying, has been asked to stop the UK's National Health Service (NHS) from cooperating with Involve and the Sortition Foundation on public deliberation projects to counter any possible undue Big Tobacco influence on their recommendations also.

See also

• Tobacco politics
• Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement
• Jeffrey Wigand
• Nicotine marketing
• "Big"
  • Big business
  • Big Media
  • Big Oil
  • Big Pharma
  • Big Soda
  • Big Tech

Further reading

• Estes, Jim (6 October 2014). "How the Big Tobacco Deal Went Bad". The New York Times. Retrieved 10 March 2018.
• Doward, Jamie (11 October 2015). "Revealed: how 'big tobacco' used EU rules to win health delay". The Observer. Retrieved 15 October 2015.

External links

• Big Tobacco Manufacturers
• Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids
• TheTruth.com
• Master Settlement Agreement