Doctor Judith Mackay is fond of using military metaphors and words like war, combat and army when describing efforts to counter tobacco companies and to control smoking.
'We may take heart from Sun Tzu's belief that victory will eventually be achieved for a just and noble cause,' the Clearwater Bay-based medic told her audience in a hawkish lecture, titled Tobacco: The Third World War, at the Royal College of Physicians of London.
Her habit of quoting great military strategists such as General Sun Tzu, to depict forces of public good relentlessly chipping away at a slowly crumbling multi-billion-dollar citadel of grim reapers, clearly irks one of her Hong Kong enemies, the Tobacco Institute's leading spin doctor Robert Fletcher.
'If you read any books on the psychology of debating, a tactic in mustering public opinion is to determine a common enemy. To do that you use words like war and army,' he said. 'I don't see it as a war. I see it as another part of doing business in the tobacco industry.' Whatever way you see it, the business of tobacco is increasingly vulnerable.
Despite massive advertising and sponsorship budgets, estimated at $500 million per year in Hong Kong alone; despite dedicated lobbying of media and politicians, and despite even the rising number of smokers in Asia, the Tobacco Institute and Mr Fletcher have good reason to be concerned that their public relations strategies are on the verge of disappearing in a puff of acrid smoke.
In the United States, the Liggett Group's move to break away from the industry last month, to admit that nicotine is addictive (a fact long denied by the once-united cabal of tobacco companies) and to acknowledge the practise of another taboo (the targeting of youngsters in advertising) has led to almost daily disclosures, threatening to undermine the foundations of the most powerful cigarette makers and to tie them up in expensive litigation for years.
Arizona's attorney-general Grant Woods called Liggett's move the 'beginning of the end for this conspiracy of lies and deception perpetuated on the American public by the tobacco companies'.
