The Looming Humanitarian Disaster On Our Doorstep

August 26, 2012

The new frontier for tobacco companies is the Asia Pacific.

THIS is all you need to know about tobacco companies. They make a huge amount of money from selling an addictive product that kills its users. They know it. They don’t care.

In the 20th century, 100 million people worldwide died of tobacco-related diseases. In the 21st, that number is expected to grow to 1 billion. It is a shocking figure, and cannot be excused even on the grounds of ignorance. Cigarette manufacturers were among the first in the world to realise the harmful and addictive nature of their product, but denied the truth for decades. The extent of the deception was only revealed in 1998, when a US court case resulted in the release of 6 million damning internal documents from seven of the world’s biggest tobacco companies. Even after this watershed moment, Big Tobacco has continued to tie itself in moral knots as it concedes its product is dangerous but fights every measure to curb it. The legal challenge to plain packaging in this country is only the latest example. The moral compass of the industry was again revealed by its warnings that it would lower the price of cigarettes if it had to abide by the new laws.

We can be proud to say that in Australia, the fight against cigarettes is being won, if slowly. Smoking rates have been in steady decline, driven by a combination of health campaigns and tighter regulation. Only 16.6 per cent of adult Australians smoke, down from 34 per cent in 1980.

The trend is the same in most of the developed world, but you don’t have to look far to see a different story. Australia aside, the Asia Pacific region has become the world capital of smoking. Lax regulation and low taxes mean that even the very poor can afford cigarettes, and the industry has predicted that it would pick up 30 million new smokers between 2009 and 2014. Professor Mike Daube, a World Health Organisation tobacco control adviser and president of the Australian Council on Smoking and Health, described the companies’ behaviour as ”wilfully imposing a pandemic on developing countries”.

It is a claim borne out by the numbers. In China there are more than 300 million smokers; between them they account for one in every three cigarettes smoked on Earth. What is even more remarkable is that only 2.1 per cent of Chinese women smoke – a vast untapped market that the history of the tobacco industry suggests will soon be targeted. That pool of potential smokers represents, in the words of one expert, the possibility of an ”unmitigated public disaster”. In Indonesia, there are 65 million smokers, many of whom became addicted before their 10th birthday. From 1995 to 2010, the number of smokers aged 10 to 14 increased sixfold, to 426,000. Most shockingly, 2 per cent of smokers start by age four.

The human face of this epidemic is the picture published on the front page of today’s Sunday Age. It is of Muhammad Dihan Awalidan (pictured left), a four-year-old Javanese villager who smokes a packet of cigarettes a day. While his parents deserve the good share of blame for this disgrace, his behaviour needs to be put in the context of a country where tobacco advertising is ubiquitous, schools are sponsored by tobacco companies and the industry is so powerful that a bill to create smoke-free zones and place graphic health warnings on packets was delayed because it was ”very biased towards the anti-tobacco lobby”.

Tobacco is a legal product, and it is up to governments to control its sale and promotion. But there is no moral defence for cigarettes. The industry is a historical anomaly; if tobacco was a newly discovered product, it would never be allowed to be sold. It is the only legal product that when used correctly will kill you. That tobacco companies spend billions of dollars to advertise their toxic wares, and lobby governments to continue to allow them to, is shameful.

And another thing…

LONG gone are the days when families and friends gathered around the old upright piano for a song or two. Now it seems the upright itself is increasingly losing out to digital pianos or keyboards, or is perhaps slightly out of tune with modern life. While old pianos can be so expensive to repair it just isn’t worth it, they are also not easily put out with the hard rubbish.

And so piano movers are now doubling as piano destroyers, taking the axe to the upright, saving any recyclable parts and sending the rest to the tip. Anyone who has learnt piano, or grown up with someone who tickles the ivories, will know the great sentimental value that can be attached to it. But with an instrument of that size, sometimes sentiment loses out to practicality. Besides, there’s only so many times two people can jump on and play Chopsticks before that, too, loses its appeal.

www.theage.com