Smoke in Their Eyes: Lessons in Movement Leadership from the Tobacco Wars

35. And the Rest of the Globe?

249 35 And the Rest of the Globe? In grandiose style, Dick Scruggs, the lawyer-architect of the the attorneys general’s cases, had christened their negotiations in the spring of 1997 the pursuit of “a global settlement.” In the U.S. context, of course, it was indeed global—it encompassed all the state and private lawsuits and set the menu for comprehensive congressional tobacco control legislation . But for many tobacco control advocates around the world, the adoption of the word “global” was a global provocation! Surely, a global solution to the ravages of tobacco use is sorely needed. By 2000, more than 70 percent of the world’s tobacco consumption was in developing countries. This means that by 2020, 70 percent of the projected 8.4 million annual deaths caused by smoking will also be in developing countries. Meanwhile, the wonders of globalization have brought Philip Morris and BAT (British-American Tobacco), with their full kit of marketing tricks targeted at the “developing” markets of women and children—now at least dampened in the developed countries —to those same developing countries. Soon after the settlement negotiations became public, on May 23, 1997, Ralph Nader and Rob Weissman warned: The tobacco industry talks about “global peace,” yet it steadfastly refuses even to discuss its practices abroad. The Fifth Commandment does not say, “Thou shalt not kill Americans.” No acceptable deal can discriminate between American and non-American victims, or fail to afford at least equivalent protections and guarantees to other countries’ citizens in terms of marketing limitations, labeling requirements, nicotine and ingredient regulation, requirements for reduction of new child smokers and other provisions. In the absence of such protections, the potential American public gains from any deal with the tobacco companies will be out weighed by the tobacco companies’ efforts to hook youngsters in other countries. 250 Smoke in Their Eyes Weissman and Stan Glantz took full advantage of the lively international tobacco control Internet exchange, “Globalink,” run by the International Union Against Cancer (UICC) to mobilize overseas outrage and opposition to the settlement. They speedily alarmed and recruited an array of the globe’s most prominent tobacco control advocates as signatories to a statement denouncing talks “aimed at achieving a ‘global settlement’ ” for excluding “consideration of the public health consequences of U.S. tobacco exports and the U.S. tobacco litigation which does not include measures to control the use of U.S. tobacco products outside of the United States.” The statement maintained that “to avoid doing public health harm, a settlement must set a worldwide floor on U.S. tobacco company practices , and a series of specific demands both for comprehensive regulation of U.S. owned tobacco company practices abroad, full compensation by the companies to foreign governments for the medical costs sustained in treating tobacco’s victims, full liability exposure of the U.S. companies for damages caused their foreign victims, and $10 billion annual reparations from the U.S. companies to the World Health Organization.” Glantz cut the argument succinctly: “Even if fewer Americans die as a result of this deal, it will be at the price of more deaths overseas.” These demands were not likely to resonate for the state attorneys general, beholden only to the state citizens on whose behalf they were employed, and for whose benefit they had sued. Nor were they likely to be taken seriously among senators and members of Congress chronically resistant to taking any serious measures to indemnify or protect American children from the domestic U.S. companies, let alone foreigners . There are also constitutional constraints on the ability of Congress to regulate the activities of overseas subsidiaries of U.S. companies , and the U.S.-based companies had the ability to divest themselves of their overseas subsidiaries—as R. J. Reynolds subsequently did, selling its subsidiaries to Japan Tobacco and rendering them unreachable by U.S. laws and regulations. Still, the public health negotiators of the settlement, principally Matt, Christine Gregoire, Lonnie Bristow, and Tom Green, had not neglected the outrages committed by U.S. tobacco companies overseas. Indeed, the settlement included $1 million a year in industry payments to the Department of Health and Human Services, earmarked to fund international government and nongovernment tobacco control efforts. This was a huge sum compared to the less than $1 million a year then allo- Lessons from the Settlement and its Aftermath 251 cated by the World Health...