The National Council Against Smoking (NCAS) has welcomed a landmark United States court finding that the tobacco industry has lied for decades about the harmful effects of smoking in order to protect its profits.
NCAS director Dr Yussuf Saloojee said the judgement, which ruled that major cigarette makers had ”publicly denied, distorted and minimised” the hazards of smoking, had exposed the ”rotten core” at the heart of the tobacco industry.
”Its carefully crafted, but wafer thin, mask of respectability has been ripped off,” he said in a statement on Friday.
Saloojee warned that while the court had ordered the industry in the US to stop these practices, in the rest of world it would be free to ”continue to lie and deceive”, at the cost of millions of lives in poor countries.
He said the tobacco amendment Bill due to go before Parliament this year would try to end some of the practices the US judge ruled were fraudulent.
The draft legislation sought to ban the use of labels such as ”light” and ”mild”, and would stop companies from manipulating the design and composition of cigarettes to ensure high nicotine delivery and addiction.
”But even though the US court has found these laws necessary and sensible, they are being opposed by the industry in South Africa,” he said.
The landmark ruling, delivered in Washington on Thursday by District Judge Gladys Kessler, found the companies guilty of civil fraud and racketeering, and endorsed the government’s case that it was incontrovertible that cigarette smoking causes disease and death.
”Defendants have marketed and sold their lethal product with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success, and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted,” Kessler said.
She banned the industry from using misleading descriptive terms such as ”lights” on cigarettes, and ordered that the companies targeted in the case, including British American Tobacco and Philip Morris, publish ”corrective statements” spelling out the hazards of smoking.
Filed in September 1999, the lawsuit was the largest civil racketeering suit in history and culminated in a nine-month trial that ended in June 2005. — Sapa