Critical Consumer Pat Sidley
NEXT week’s Budget will please citizens who have become secondhand tobacco consumers without their consent: the anti-smoking lobby is expecting a tobacco tax increase. This may be between 25c and 40c per pack of 20s. It may not be nearly enough, but at least it’s something.
And if the past is anything to go by, the tobacco industry will push the prices up much more and blame the minister of health while they take hefty increases in profits.
Consumers who have not followed closely how this system works may find it interesting to note that the people at the Department of Health usually want the tax increased by a larger amount. However, their cabinet colleagues (mostly in the Department of Finance), bolstered by the tobacco industry, usually manage to argue the amount down.
The Department of Health is also looking at banning smoke on all forms of public transport after a run of complaints, particularly on buses. The department is, however, not looking at new legislation to make our workplaces healthier. Nor is it contemplating any further legislation to force local authorities to clean their air.
Very few local authorities have availed themselves of the opportunity to impose restrictions on smoking in, for instance, restaurants. So non-smoking consumers in those Johannesburg restaurants which enforce the regulation are in luck. But others who eat at, for instance, Bodega, the trendy Italian restaurant in Rosebank where Rolling Stone Mick Jagger ate chicken recently, will be assailed by a regular flounting of the regulations. Bodega is off-hand with consumers who complain about this, and so are many other eateries.
Dr Derek Yach of the Medical Research Council believes active anti-smoking groups are the only way to deal with this situation of non-enforcement, and there are a few such groups to be found at the moment.
Meanwhile, for those in doubt about the hazardous properties of secondhand smoke, the American consumer publication Consumer Reports has pulled together an ugly collection of facts which counter the tobacco industry’s slick attempts to discredit scientific information showing the dangers of passive smoking.
This followed the 1993 declaration of the United States Environmental Protection Agency which stated that secondhand smoke was a known human carcinogen. It was no longer “possible” or “likely” but actually a “known” cause of cancer.That decision, of course, fueled attempts to get smoking banned in areas where non- smokers would be compromised by it, such as in public places, like cinemas and restaurants, or in the
Employers in the US began to fear claims from employees claiming their diseases were caused by exposure to smoke in the workplace. This is an avenue open to South African workers but it has not been used yet.
Several US studies cited in the Consumer Reports have been mirrored by studies here, according to Yach. For instance, local studies have shown that birth weight has been adversely affected by secondhand smoke. Studies locally have also positively linked passive smoking in parents to serious respiratory disorders in
Consumer Reports points to the fact that studies on passive smoking as well as asbestos, radon and other commodities rely on epidemeological evidence — or evidence drawn from the study of disease patterns in human populations.Of 33 such studies, 26 linked cancer to passive smoking; they indicated that people inhaling other people’s smoke were between eight percent and 150 percent more likely to get cancer.
Consumer Reports has also looked at the success of the tobacco lobby in watering down the effects in the public mind of the anti-smoking lobby. Only four percent of the articles published after tobacco industry-funded symposia on passive smoking condemned passive smoking as unhealthy. In other articles, around 65 percent of them said it was unhealthy. Seventy-two percent of industry-funded reports argue that secondhand smoke is not harmful, while only 20 percent of independent journals argued the same.
Consumer Reports has dissected the properties of sidestream smoke which it defines as being the smoke “which curls off the end of the smoking cigarette” and is “the main component of secondhand smoke and is different in composition from the ‘mainstream’ smoke that smokers inhale”.
Among the known or probable human carcinogens in sidestream smoke in greater concentrations than in mainstream smoke are N-nitrodiethylamine, 4- Aminobiphenyl, Aniline, Cadmium and Benzo[a]pyrene.
The tobacco industry, in trying to counter the effects of the anti-passive smoking lobby, published only the results of how much nicotine was in the sidestream smoke — not very much at all. But that was essentially dishonest; although nicotine is addictive, it does not cause cancer.
The tobacco company which did this told Consumer Reports it was “not trying to hoodwink people. The main thing is that the concentration is very very small”. And the Tobacco Institute told the magazine it was “wrong to assume that non-smokers are breathing the same mix of compounds as that measured in laboratory studies of sidestream smoke”.