University of Cape Town courted by Philip Morris International

The University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health has accepted over R1 million (approximately €61,166) from the Smoke-Free World Foundation, a foundation funded by Philip Morris International. The donation was intended to establish a tobacco research hub, the African Centre of Excellence for Smoking and Mental Health, at the university. The data only became public when the foundation’s 2018 income statement was released.[1], at the same time as the university was developing guidelines to ban tobacco industry funding from the university sector. By then, R300,000 (about $18,349) had already been paid to the psychiatry department. The contract has since been cancelled but still caused a wave of outrage in other departments of the university as well as among other donors. The University of Cape Town has a world-renowned tobacco control research unit. This is a major challenge for the tobacco industry, for whom control and distortion of scientific truth are important strategies for defending their interests. In 2001, a study published in the American Journal of Public Health examined tens of thousands of industry documents relating to attempts to discredit scientific evidence on the harms of tobacco[2]. Non-profit organisations act as forward guards for industry, which remotely control the production of knowledge about tobacco risks. This phenomenon is not isolated to South Africa. Stellenbosch University’s business school recently accepted about R1.2 million for a tobacco control project called “An ethical framework for a smoke-free world”. ©Tobacco Free Generation

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[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20190527081643/https://www.smokefreeworld.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/fsfw_2018_form_990-pf_public_inspection.pdf [2] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdfplus/10.2105/AJPH.91.9.1419 || ©DNF For a Zero Tobacco world