Big Tobacco whines: Gettin’ harder to kill you!

That’s the essence of Big Tobacco’s latest whine, as their massive efforts to create new smokers in the Third World start running into regulatory resistance.

It’s the legal drugs you’ve got to worry about, with booze and smokes killing vastly greater numbers than all the illegal drugs in the world [deaths in significant part caused more by drug illegality than by any adverse effects of the drugs themselves].

In the Native American cultures we studied by in our college days, tobacco use was tightly restricted within ceremonial boundaries. But in a Europe eager to embrace each new chemical high, tobacco found a ready market, especially in the tea and chocolate — and later [after the Siege of Vienna] coffee — houses.

George Washington grew tobacco, and rage over a tea tax helped spark a revolution.

Opium, cocaine, cannabis, and other drugs were freely available at drug stores in the U.S. until San Francisco banned opium, part of a virulently racist anti-Chinese movement. Marijuana and cocaine became illegal as the result of similarly inflamed rhetoric about “drug-crazed” black and brown people.

Meanwhile, Big Tobacco hired Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, to make smoking acceptable among the largest segment of the American population, women. Cigarettes were rebrand as “Torches of Freedom,” a campaign launched by a sneaking a pair of women smoking Lucky Strikes into the Easter Parade march down Fifth Avenue, with the press tipped in advance. Feminists quickly lit up, and other women followed.

Here’s Bernays telling the story:

Nicotine’s a curious alkaloid. Too much kills you [the CIA once tried to whack Fidel Castro with the stuff], but in small amounts it exerts  contradictory effects. If you’re tired, it provides a stimulus, while if you’re hyper, it calms you down. No wonder it’s so hard to kick.

But growing awareness of the huge health costs produced by the smoking industry has led to higher taxes and tighter regulations throughout the First World, and with the domestic market under siege [except in Nevada casinos], Big Tobacco has turned its biggest guns on the Third World.

But even here, they’re running into problems and have turned to the World Bank for help, reports Duff Wilson for the New York Times:

As sales to developing nations become ever more important to giant tobacco companies, they are stepping up efforts around the world to fight tough restrictions on the marketing of cigarettes.

Companies like Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco are contesting limits on advertising in Britain, bigger health warnings in South America and higher cigarette taxes in the Philippines and Mexico. They are also spending billions on lobbying and promotional campaigns in Africa, and in one case providing undisclosed financing for TV commercials in Australia.

The industry has ramped up its efforts in advance of a gathering in Uruguay this week of public health officials from 171 nations, who plan to shape guidelines to enforce a global anti-smoking treaty.

This year, Philip Morris International sued the government of Uruguay, saying its tobacco regulations were excessive. World Health Organization officials say the suit represents an effort by the industry to intimidate the country, as well as other nations attending the conference, that are considering strict marketing requirements for tobacco.

Uruguay’s groundbreaking law mandates that health warnings cover 80 percent of cigarette packages. It also limits each brand, like Marlboro, to one package design, so that alternate designs don’t mislead smokers into believing the products inside are less harmful.

The lawsuit against Uruguay, filed at a World Bank affiliate in Washington, seeks unspecified damages for lost profits.

“They’re using litigation to threaten low- and middle-income countries,” says Dr. Douglas Bettcher, head of the W.H.O.’s Tobacco Free Initiative. Uruguay’s gross domestic profit is half the size of the company’s $66 billion in annual sales.

Peter Nixon, a vice president and spokesman for Philip Morris International, said the company was complying with every nation’s marketing laws while selling a lawful product for adult consumers.

He said the company’s lawsuits were intended to combat what it felt were “excessive” regulations, and to protect its trademark and commercial property rights.

Cigarette companies are aggressively recruiting new customers in developing nations, Dr. Bettcher said, to replace those who are quitting or dying in the United States and Europe, where smoking rates have fallen precipitously. Worldwide cigarette sales are rising 2 percent a year.

But the number of countries adopting tougher rules, as well as the global treaty, underscore the breadth of the battleground between tobacco and public health interests in legal and political arenas from Latin America to Africa to Asia.

The cigarette companies work together to fight some strict policies and go their separate ways on others. For instance, Philip Morris USA, a division of Altria Group, helped negotiate and supported the anti-smoking legislation passed by Congress last year and did not join a lawsuit filed by R. J. Reynolds, Lorillard and other tobacco companies against the Food and Drug Administration. So far, it is not protesting the agency’s new rules, proposed last week, requiring graphic images with health warnings on cigarette packs.

But Philip Morris International, the separate company spun out of Altria in 2008 to expand the company’s presence in foreign markets, has been especially aggressive in fighting new restrictions overseas.

Read the rest here.

And, for the record, esnl smokes.