Cigarette stock prices rose after Big Tobacco's November 1998 settlement with the states, who continue paying big bucks for smoking related medical expenses.  The companies agreed to cough up $246 billion over 25 years, but these payments are tax-deductible and would decrease if cigarette sales drop.  Focusing only on the U.S., the settlement does virtually nothing to discourage the companies from pushing their dope overseas.
         Facing declining domestic sales through the 70s and 80s, U.S. tobacco
corporations have been increasingly aggressive internationally and now sell many more cigarettes abroad than here.  In the 1980s, the U.S. government threatened trade sanctions against Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand unless they opened their markets to American cigarettes.  Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop said that "what the companies did was shocking, but even more appalling was the fact that our government helped make it possible."  The World Health Organization (WHO) reports a near doubling of per-capita cigarette consumption in the Western Pacific region from the early 70s to the early 90s.  Smoking is also increasing in Africa and Eastern Europe.  Worldwide, tobacco now claims 3 million lives a year, with 30% of the deaths in poor or "developing" countries.  If current trends continue, the WHO predicts 10 million deaths annually by 2025, with 70% of them in developing countries including 2 million in China alone.
         Countries unable to feed their own people don't need more cigarettes.  Children of poor families can go hungry while the scant money available feeds nicotine addiction.  We certainly shouldn't be encouraging them to smoke, but tobacco companies advertise heavily overseas and especially target women and young people with the message that smoking is glamorous, modern, and sophisticated.  They also lobby foreign governments for "point of sale" displays at the cash register (which facilitate impulse buying), and for reduced tobacco taxes and weakened health warning labels.
         Ralph Nader's group "Public Citizen" did a worldwide study of cigarette package warning labels.  Requirements vary greatly.  Stronger warnings are bigger, appear on both front and back (instead of just on the side), make specific warnings (rather than vague references to "health problems"), and rotate numerous different warnings, such as "smoking can kill you" or "cigarettes cause strokes, cancer, and heart disease."  European warnings are stronger than ours, but Japan requires only the lame recommendation:  "Be careful not to smoke too much, because it might be harmful to your health."  Not surprisingly, the study found that cigarette companies usually print warnings meeting only the bare minimum requirements of local law, and that developing countries generally have the weakest warning label requirements.
         Along with smoking, farming of tobacco also devastates poor countries.  Despite our own cultivation in the Carolinas, Virginia, and Kentucky, developing countries grow about 80% of the world's tobacco, according to the International Tobacco Growers Association.  Nations as diverse as Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Malawi, and Zimbabwe are heavily dependent on it for foreign income, and even densely populated India somehow finds room for this crop.
         When nearby people suffer slow death from starvation, it's obscene to grow
tobacco for export on land well suited for corn, beans, or potatoes.  Unfortunately, that's exactly what's happening in many places due to global financial arrangements administered by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.  Zimbabwe is the world's biggest tobacco exporter.  In Kenya, the British American Tobacco Company contracts with thousands of farmers to cultivate tobacco on about 37,000 acres, while a survey by the UN Children's Fund reports that 52% of children in Kenya's Migori district are malnourished.  Tobacco also leads to worsening deforestation, as farmers sometimes burn wood fires to "cure" the tobacco leaf.
         So, we buy much of the developing world's tobacco crop, package it into
cigarettes, and then sell them back the "value-added" smokes, raking off enormous profits while allowing them to worry about the health consequences.  No wonder the "industry" was thrilled to complete that settlement.  Stanton Glantz, a UC San Francisco medicine professor and leading critic of Big Tobacco, said that "...what they want is peace.  They want certainty.  And tobacco is immensely profitable.  So they can pay out billions of dollars and still make buckets of money.  But they don't want to have the threat of litigation keeping them from going about their business...they're losing in America and they're almost willing to write off America so that they can go about pillaging the rest of the world, killing people overseas."
         In this country, the Centers for Disease Control recently reported that the overall U.S. smoking rate has barely changed in the 90s.  In the 80s, Surgeon General Koop called for "a smoke-free America by the year 2000."  It didn't happen.  Almost unbelievably, we are still subsidizing U.S. tobacco farmers, who when their crops fail receive government "insurance" payments averaging 30 to 40 million dollars annually; legislation to end this insanity failed narrowly in 1997.
         A recently released movie, "The Insider," dramatizes the case of chemist Dr.
Jeffrey Wigand, who had been highly paid Vice-President for Research and Development of the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation, but who was fired in 1993 for expressing too many moral scruples about the blatant disregard of health considerations by the company's twisted management.  He later broke his "confidentiality agreement" with Brown & Williamson by speaking with investigators from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and with CBS News.  After media delay stemming from fear of a huge lawsuit, and after relentless and repugnant industry efforts to ruin his life and reputation, Wigand's story was finally aired in a famous segment of CBS' "60 Minutes" in 1996.  His revelations include how the company added ammonia to its smokes for "impact boosting," since ammonia increases the absorbtion of nicotine through the lungs and thus renders cigarettes even more addictive.
         Big Tobacco must at least be relieved that "The Insider" got an "R" rating;
hopefully tobacco money didn't influence the rating process.  The only possible
justification for restricting access to this movie is some very believable use of the "F word" by characters under extreme pressure.  There is no sex and no violence, except for the extraordinary implied violence of pushing a "product" that causes millions to suffer years of poor health and/or a slow, painful death.  The film probably should have included a character with advanced emphysema, dependent on medicated inhaler treatments and gasping for each breath on supplemental oxygen, but perhaps the director felt that enough of us have sufficient real life experience of such things to fill in that particular scene for ourselves.
         Many of us have money in banks, mutual funds, or 401k accounts which in turn are "invested" in and reap profits tainted by the likes of Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man (hit men for RJR Nabisco and Phillip Morris, respectively).  We who are part owners share the companies' responsibility, since they act to maximize shareholder wealth.  Warren Buffett, the eccentric and homespun investment wizard from Nebraska and world's second richest person, said that the economics of cigarettes "...are great.  You make a product for a penny, you sell it for a dollar, and you sell it to addicts.  And it has tremendous brand loyalty."  Buffett does have a conscience, but unfortunately didn't let it overwhelm his monetary judgement when he invested in tobacco peddler RJR Nabisco, saying only that "the product--it's got some problems.  I don't think I'd want it on my tombstone that I was a partner in it."
         Tell your financial institutions to divest their tobacco holdings, and consider
keeping any savings you might have in local credit unions or "socially responsible" mutual funds that scrupulously avoid tobacco.  It would be thrilling to see the value of cigarette shares plummet in the stock market.
         Most importantly, don't smoke.  Don't torture your body, don't donate your money to those murderous companies, and don't be party to squandering a single square foot of agricultural land in Kenya or Zimbabwe--let them grow corn instead.
 
 
 

Action on Smoking and Health:  "ASH is a London-based charity providing information on all aspects of tobacco and campaigning to reduce the unnecessary addiction, disease and premature death caused by smoking."

Smokescreen:  here is the study by Ralph Nader's "Public Citizen" about cigarette pack warning labels around the world.

Transcript of CBS' 60 Minutes interview with Dr. Jeffrey Wigand.

World Health Organization:  Tobacco Free Initiative

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:  Smoking information

Here's an article about tobacco farming and food in Kenya.