When PMI gets a platform in a French daily

July 9, 2020

Par: communication@cnct.fr

Dernière mise à jour: August 6, 2024

Temps de lecture: 8 minutes

In a column published in l'Opinion, Jeanne Pollès, president of Philip Morris France, promotes new tobacco products and calls on public authorities to mobilize the business world, and in particular cigarette manufacturers, to initiate a " strategic shift ", to meet current societal, economic, health and climate challenges[1]It is interesting to take up one by one the arguments deployed by Jeanne Pollès, offering a large number of untruths, in order to decipher them.

“The Covid crisis has shown that business can contribute to the common good”

The tobacco industry, and in particular Philip Morris International (PMI), has been singled out for taking advantage of the global pandemic to showcase itself during marketing operations and image enhancement. For example, in April 2019, the company Apastratos, owned by PMI to the tune of 40%, offered 50 ventilators to Greek hospitals. This operation is all the more questionable when we know that Smoking increases the risk of developing complications following infection with the virus, or that cigarette companies have opposed several public health measures across the world to halt the spread of the Coronavirus. In South Africa, the latter have notably initiated legal proceedings against the government, which had exceptionally banned the sale of tobacco products during the lockdown period, as they were deemed non-essential and could worsen the epidemic.

"Can a tobacco company also claim to improve the world as it is, and not as we would like it to be, without risky behavior? That is the choice we have made!"

This verbatim summary summarizes a classic argument of the tobacco industry. First, Jeanne Pollès propels the tobacco industry to the rank of responsible and committed social actor. In the subtext, the president of PMI France opposes the cigarette manufacturers, representatives of a pragmatic vision (" a world as it is "), to the world of public health and the fight against tobacco, out of touch, limited to a biased and dogmatic vision (" a world as we would like it to be "This rhetorical process aims here to discredit and disqualify the expertise and legitimacy of public health actors as well as anti-smoking measures, which are by definition irreconcilable with the economic interests of this industry.

"We have also chosen a global transformation [...] in the face of new societal expectations and health, climate and economic challenges »

Here we see that the tobacco industry has understood that the various current global issues constitute a real lever of communication, useful for restoring an image tarnished for decades by a succession of scandals, health-related or not. In reality, the record of the cigarette companies is catastrophic at all these levels.

On the societal issue, the tobacco industry has been characterized by extremely aggressive marketing targeting young people, women, African-Americans, the LGBT community, and minorities in general.
On the health issue, it is useful to remember that smoking is the direct cause of more than eight million deaths per year, while the tobacco industry systematically opposes any public health policy that would reduce the number of victims.
The industry is also doing poorly on climate: the total greenhouse gas emissions from cigarette companies are equivalent to those of a country like Israel.[2] and that's without even mentioning all the other misdeeds the environment related to tobacco products.
Economically, the tobacco industry is not only an obstacle to development in many low- and middle-income countries, but it is also a direct factor in a structural and multi-generational impoverishment across many regions of the world and populations. According to Tobacco Control, tobacco-related health expenditures alone worldwide amount to $422 billion per year[3]. That is more than the GDP of a country like Austria.

“At PMI, we work with tobacco growers to build a new sustainable model that respects local balances”

For several decades, the tobacco industry has shifted most of its tobacco production to low- and middle-income countries (90%). It is directly responsible for the destruction and pollution of soils and groundwater through intensive use of particularly dangerous pesticides, a general impoverishment of biodiversity (5% of global deforestation), leading to climate and food insecurity in some countries, such as Malawi.

"We are now part of the solution to the public health problem of smoking"

Beyond the commercial interest of new tobacco products, they are a way to short-circuit and render obsolete proven prevention and anti-smoking policies. By presenting their innovations as the solution to the health problem of smoking, cigarette companies are trying to present themselves as responsible, indispensable and legitimate players in order to return to the discussion table. In other words, cigarette companies are now trying to present themselves as the solution to an industrial epidemic that they themselves have been spreading for over a century. This strategy is not new: it is a constant in the tobacco industry's positioning to come back with "new products" presented as less dangerous and which would be a solution to the problems they themselves induce. This is notably the example of filters, proposed by cigarette companies as a less harmful solution, while the former find no health justification. On the contrary, the filter allows the user to take deeper and more prolonged puffs, increasing the health risks and the level of addiction for the smoker.

This position is all the more problematic since, according to the WHO, there is no evidence that heated tobacco is less harmful than traditional cigarettes. Furthermore, as the European Respiratory Society points out, internal sources in the tobacco industry have denounced the existence of irregularities in the clinical trials conducted by the industry on heated tobacco.[4]. Thus, an independent study revealed that in IQOS, PMI's heated tobacco device, the actual number of toxic compounds was between six and seven times higher as the company indicated.

Finally, the levels of nicotine and tar in heated tobacco are almost identical to those observed in a conventional cigarette.[5].

The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control provides a mechanism to exclude cigarette manufacturers from the development and implementation of public tobacco control policies. Jeanne Pollès' entire column focuses on this point: by posing as a responsible and indispensable player on health issues through the promotion of new products, the tobacco industry aims to become a legitimate partner, thereby bypassing public anti-smoking policies that are incompatible with its interests. Beyond simple self-promotion, Jeanne Pollès' column is a real plea to redefine the regulatory framework for tobacco products. This intervention can also be seen as a strategy to circumvent the law, prohibiting any form of direct or indirect advertising for tobacco products.