Tobacco Industry's Tactics Against Anti-Tobacco Policies

Date: Jun-27-2012In this week's issue of PLoS Medicine, UK public health experts write that it is fair to say that the tobacco industry's comprehensive and huge response to the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control is adopting a 'globalization of tobacco industry strategy' in combating the development of effective tobacco control policies.

To gain a greater understanding of the transnational tobacco corporations' regional and global strategies, it is vital to look past individual case studies that have been influenced by the tobacco industry.

To investigate the strategies that transnational tobacco corporations use in order to influence the WHO Convention, the authors from Edinburgh and Bath University studied websites, academic articles and several internal tobacco industry documents that were released due to US litigation.

They found that the transnational tobacco corporations' strategically developed a range of arguments for challenging the Convention. For instance, they claimed the Convention would have damaging economic consequences and questioned the World Health Organization's mandate to develop an international treaty. In addition, they suggested that the industry's corporate social responsibility activities could be an alternative to the Convention. The transnational tobacco corporations subsequently used various promotion strategies to support and underline their arguments, for instance by targeting Convention delegations and using various allies, such as scientists and media outlets.

Leading author, Heide Weishaar, from the Centre for Population Health Sciences in Edinburgh states:

"This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of transnational tobacco corporations' tactics to undermine the development of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. The findings illustrate the variety and complexity of tobacco industry efforts to undermine the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and demonstrate the extent to which transnational tobacco corporations' are able to combine and coordinate these approaches on an international stage."

She concludes:

"The analysis of the transnational tobacco corporations' fight to prevent, then undermine and weaken the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control can serve as a case study for research into how corporate tactics can be employed on a global scale to undermine the development of international initiatives."

Written by Petra Rattue

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