Tobacco lobby will take any steps to derail public health laws

The Executive Director of the Hong Kong Tobacco Institute, Peter Tam Chung-ho, denies that the tobacco industry uses a 'culture of fear' to obstruct measures to protect workers and the public from second-hand smoke (South China Morning Post, September 26).

However, previously secret tobacco industry documents, released under a legal settlement in 1998, tell a very different story. They show that tobacco companies regard the control of indoor air pollution by tobacco smoke as one of the biggest threats to their markets and revenues and that they will take any steps which they think may derail public health legislation in this area.

In 1989, a meeting of Philip Morris executives in New York records: 'It is essential that we defeat or substantially water down the COSH [Council on Smoking and Health] proposal in Hong Kong to ensure that it is not used as a precedent for the region.'

Despite predicting economic ruin for smoke-free restaurants for 20 years, with bogus 'surveys' to back them up, there is no evidence, based on a methodologically correct assessment of sales or tax returns, to show that this has ever happened worldwide. Hospitality revenues have been stable, or have increased, following the introduction of smoke-free policies.

The tobacco industry privately admits that what it says is not true. In 1994, a Philip Morris marketing and sales director stated that 'economic arguments used by the industry to scare off smoking ban activity were no longer working, if indeed they ever did. These arguments simply had no credibility with the public, which isn't surprising when you consider our dire predictions in the past rarely came true.'

The Hong Kong Catering Industry Association's 2001 report on the 'financial impact' of smoke-free policies was funded by tobacco money.

It came out with yet another disaster scenario predicting massive loss of revenue and jobs. On the basis of simple arithmetic this study can be shown to be seriously flawed.