Inside Out | Tobacco should be long gone if anyone truly cared about China’s public health, instead of letting it raise funds in an IPO
- China’s tobacco virtual monopoly employs an estimated 17 million people, contributing to 11 per cent of the country’s tax revenue in 2016
- One in three of the world’s 1 billion smokers are in China, where lung cancer claims 2 million lives every year
For my 50th birthday, my daughters very creatively gifted me the December 2 1950 edition of the Financial Times. That was the edition published on the day of my birth. Since I had worked for almost two decades for the FT, the gift was a wonderful idea.
Apart from the reminder of what a fusty parochial thing the FT was back in 1950, the paper carried a fascinating full-page feature on its centre pages about an exciting newfangled innovation: the filter-tipped cigarettes.
I had naively grown up thinking that filters had been introduced in cigarettes as a health measure to reduce the nicotine and tar smokers ingested. But no such thing. These were naive times where no one had yet discovered the connection between smoking and cancer. In fact, filters were introduced because of tobacco shortages and wartime tobacco rationing.
The FT’s correspondent confidently predicted that this newfangled fashion would never last, and would be dropped as soon as rationing was lifted – one more example, if any were needed, of our dubious journalistic track record in predicting the future.
The article reminded me that the tobacco industry – which I rarely think about, and innocently assumed was in steep decline – was in fact in robust good health despite decades of ruinous bad press, and the industry’s well-documented role as a killing machine.