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This is the industry that was powerful enough to get Hollywood to change the villain in a famous novelist’s script. In 1996 John Grisham published “The Runaway Jury,” the story of a court case in which the surviving spouse of a smoker who died from cancer sues a tobacco company for wrongful death.
In 2003 the story was turned into a successful Hollywood production, “Runaway Jury.” But in the conversion, the story is changed to a wrongful death suit against a gun manufacturer, arising out of an incident where a shooter takes a semiautomatic handgun into his brokerage office and kills with it. While the substance of the book is retained in the movie, it is altered to avoid negative impact on powerful political and commercial interests – the tobacco industry.
A “smoking gun” used to mean some kind of lurking, underlying proof behind an evil deed. Oddly, now it has come to show how much influence the tobacco industry has over government, mainstream media, the entertainment industry and individual economies, when a simple novel about the evils of smoking is turned into one about gun control.
If the tobacco industry is powerful enough to impose its will on Hollywood, it certainly won’t have much trouble in Thailand. It is trying to do just that through a gathering of industry players, including its “thought leaders,” at a three-day forum in Bangkok called Tabinfo Asia 2009, which runs from Nov. 11-13. It boasts the biggest tobacco exhibition in Asia and business and networking opportunities for regional players.
Despite the industry’s influence, however, a coalition of protesters gathered to confront it at the Impact Exhibition and Conference Center where the forum is being held. One of the protest leaders, Prakit Vathesatogkit, executive secretary of Action on Smoking and Health Foundation (ASH Thailand), said at Wednesday’s protest, "Tabinfo Asia 2009 is a signal for the international community to understand that the tobacco industry will not stop brainstorming new strategies to lure new smokers, particularly youths and women."
Almost as if to underscore Prakit’s words, Tabinfo posted four main issues to be discussed by the tobacco industry’s “thought-leaders” in a global environment of changing regulations and negative public perceptions. The last of the four – which should have appeared first, if only for diplomatic purposes – was “harm and risk reduction.”
Harm and risk are messages that are not getting through to the Thai smokers of all ages who are running about the country on motorcycles, holding the handlebar with one hand and smoking with the other; or to the young students and bar patrons and academics with a lot on their minds who are smoking their way to death.
Another Hollywood script, “The Insider” – a Russell Crowe-Al Pacino movie about an insider who spills the beans on a tobacco company’s conniving to hide data on physical harm and addiction associated with tobacco products – was more successful in imparting a message about the dangers of smoking. After the movie came out Brown and Williamson, the company depicted in the film, accused the Walt Disney Company of “distorting the truth.” Brown and Williamson also sent representatives to over half a dozen cities where the movie was screened, handing out cards to moviegoers to provide “clarification.”
This movie is considered to have had a meaningful impact in helping turn the tide of public opinion against smoking. The tobacco industry does not want this scenario to recur in Asia, so that regulations and social attitudes make marketing tobacco a no-win situation. That is why Tabinfo is being held in Bangkok, to bring together “a very diverse representation of industry players, up and down the supply chain.”
Time will tell whether there is enough political clout in Thailand, and throughout Asia, to fight back against immense political and commercial pressures in order to achieve what has been achieved in the West – severe restrictions on smoking and second-hand smoke.
The fact that the state’s Thailand Tobacco Monopoly is heading up the three-day conference/exhibition/game plan meeting is not a good sign. Local influence and vested commercial interests with Thai tobacco are rife. As far back as 1950, the Thai government’s Excise Department bought 256 acres of land from the Crown Property bureau to increase tobacco production for domestic and export use. Four years later responsibility for the industry was transferred to the Ministry of Finance.
Given such grassroots beginnings and ties, it’s an uphill battle for anti-smoking advocates battling against tobacco interests. The global tobacco industry is going full bore to keep its feet planted on the ground and keep sales at all-time highs.
This is of immense concern to world players such as the World Health Organization, which warned of a “global tobacco epidemic” in 2008. The WHO also reported that by the year 2100, up to 1 billion people may die through “continuous consumption of tobacco.” That is fifteen times the entire population of present-day Thailand.
Isn’t it time to stop?
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(See Hollywood and tobacco plotting at WebMD at http://www.webmd.com/smoking-cessation/news/20080924/old-hollywood-and-big-tobacco)
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(Frank G. Anderson is the Thailand representative of American Citizens Abroad. He was a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer to Thailand from 1965-67, working in community development. A freelance writer and founder of northeast Thailand's first local English language newspaper, the Korat Post – www.thekoratpost.com – he has spent over eight years in Thailand "embedded" with the local media. He has an MBA in information management and an associate degree in construction technology. ©Copyright Frank G. Anderson.)
