The Untold Story of How
& Why Philip Morris is Pushing for FDA Regulation
Submitted by Anne Landman
PR Watch
August 17, 2007
http://www.prwatch.org/node/6351
It may seem incongruous to the average
person why Philip Morris (PM) would back legislation to restrict its business, yet that is
what PM seems to be is doing by supporting S. 625, the "Family Smoking Prevention and
Tobacco Control Act," the bill that would give the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) authority over tobacco products. After all, PM has a corporate mandate to increase
profits for its shareholders, so PM would not support this legislation if it wasn't going
to benefit its bottom line, and it is practically an axiom in public health that whatever
benefits PM's bottom line is going to be bad for public health. That's what makes this
bill especially troubling to people who study tobacco industry documents; it is clear that
PM had a hand in crafting it. That alone sounds like a lot, but PM's efforts to enact it
are clearly delivering a hefty side-benefit to PM, by causing dissent within the tobacco
control community over its passage.
Neither the content of the bill nor the
strident disagreement among tobacco control advocates is happenstance.
PM's efforts to weaken the tobacco
control community and pass FDA legislation slanted in its favor started in the mid-1990s.
A 1995 PM report titled simply "Mission," states that "Because some form of
[legislated] restriction is inevitable, it's better to shape the agenda than to stand pat
and fight." The report indicates that PM believed that it had just two alternatives:
"Fighting inch by inch against every initiative launched by the other side, or try an
end run/proactive initiative, because the next 'firestorm' could cause a major
meltdown."
Believing the "end run" option
was the only viable escape for the company, PM employees started working to develop a
comprehensive, 10-20 year strategy to "hold the line" on tobacco regulation and
preserve the social acceptability of smoking.
Industry documents make it clear that PM
fears specific legislated or regulatory measures that:
1) accelerate the decline in the social
acceptability of smoking, for example laws that restrict smoking in public places or
reduce modeling of smoking by celebrities on TV and in the movies;
2) end tobacco company advertising and
sponsorship, because this would end tobacco company access to powerful third parties who
are heavily dependent upon tobacco funds and hence reliably defend the industry's
interests;
3) limit branding and packaging
distinctions, because cigarette companies rely on ad imagery and package design to sell
certain brands to different market segments. For example, Marlboro and Camel are targeted
at men, Virginia Slims and Misty are targeted at women, a marketing strategy called
"segmentation" that greatly benefits sales;
4) treat tobacco like an addiction, for
example by mandating free nicotine cessation treatment be made available to all users, or
that would make nicotine-containing products available by prescription only;
5) make cigarettes unpalatable or
unaddictive, because then people would be able to more easily stop using them; and
6) address the additional harmful
"externalities" of smoking," like litter and cigarette-caused fires, since
these are wholly negative and costly aspects of cigarettes to which the industry does not
want to draw attention.
The measures PM is now pushing to enact
through FDA legislation will likely harm the company little if at all, and are likely to
benefit the company in the long run. For example, industry documents show that PM seeks
provisions that
1) put the burden of disclosing the
health hazards of smoking onto a third party (which takes liability off the companies);
2) put the burden of reducing the risks
of smoking onto a third party (which also takes liability off the companies);
3) involve self-regulation (because then
they won't);
4) emphasize unenforceable or minimally
enforceable voluntary agreements, like the Master Settlement Agreement, which has had
little if any appreciable effect on reducing smoking;
5) force regulators to consider the
economic impact of their actions on tobacco companies and their associated businesses; and
6) reinforce the notion that smoking is a
free choice and not an addiction-enforced activity.
The proposed FDA regulations hand PM
many, and probably most, of its preferred measures.
PM's Project Sunrise: PM's Plan to
Weaken Tobacco Control Forces by Dividing Them
In 1996 PM carried out a "visioning
exercise" called "Project Sunrise", in which employees of Philip Morris
Corporate Affairs and other departments considered a panoply of future regulatory and
social scenarios, each increasingly grim. The grimmest scenarios were assigned names like
"Avalanche" and "Blade Runner." Through this "visioning"
exercise, PM concluded that the company had to deal with "the antis" (public
health advocates) by weakening their credibility and dividing their ranks.
Sure enough, we are seing that an
additional bonus of PM's pursuit of FDA regulation is that its efforts are fracturing
tobacco control forces, just as PM planned.
Public Health Advocates are The
"Anti-Tobacco Industry"
The same year PM engaged in Project
Sunrise, it also developed an "Anti-Tobacco Industry Plan" (or "ATI
Plan"), a long-term strategy designed to hobble public health efforts to reduce
smoking. PM sought to position the company as being reasonable and responsible while
minimizing the "other side's" ability to engage in efforts to reduce smoking.
PM's ATI plan states,
Our Fourth Strategy focuses on efforts to
cause dissention [sic]within the ATI [Anti-Tobacco Industry]: 1) As the tobacco company
that is seeking "reasonable solutions to complex problems" we want to reach out
to members of the ATI where we can potentially establish Common Ground --such as on the
issue of preventing youth access to tobacco products. 2) We also want to enhance internal
conflicts that already exist within the ATI --and possibly encourage some new ones.
Josh Slavitt, PM's Director of Policies
and Programs, describes PM's plans further:
Form relationships with anti-tobacco
groups that are the most amenable to this company's positions in order to enhance our
credibility by demonstrating our ability to seek realistic solutions on tobacco-related
issues. In addition, build relationships with so-called "moderate" anti-tobacco
groups in order to disrupt the ATI's cohesion and create opportunities to focus attention
on prohibitionists.
Equating tobacco control advocacy with
prohibition in the public mind is a longtime tobacco industry tactic to weaken public
health, and the aim of a long-running national ad campaign by R.J. Reynolds called Project
Breakthrough.
PM's efforts seemed to have tracked very
closely with its ATI plan. PM approached the National Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids
(CTFK) seeking input to formulate its preferred FDA regulations. As the Plan mentioned, PM
found common ground with CTFK on the youth smoking issue, and engaged CTFK in its
Regulatory Strategy Project to craft FDA regulations in its favor.
Now CTFK is helping PM stump for passage
of a bill that many highly experienced tobacco control people and organizations consider
deeply flawed in many respects. An article in the October 5, 2004 edition of Roll Call,
the newspaper of Capitol Hill, titled "How Philip Morris, Tobacco Foes Tied the
Knot," describes the uncomfortable first meeting between Matt Myers, President and
Chief Executive Officer of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, and Mark Berlind, Associate
General Counsel of Philip Morris, and the subsequent secret negotiations carried on
without notifying others in the tobacco control community:
Thanks to separate but equally calculated
decisions by Philip Morris and the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, each has broken ranks
with their typical allies, formed a secret alliance and met clandestinely to iron out key
sticking points on the legislation...The face-to-face negotiating sessions and conference
calls were so sensitive that Philip Morris and the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids refused
to tell even their closest allies...Unbeknownst to their allies in the public health
community, representatives of the Tobacco Free Kids spoke with Philip Morris lobbyists
several times and met at least once to iron out language that both sides could accept...
Dr. Michael Givel of the Department of
Political Science at the University of Oklahoma, in a July 2007 editorial about FDA
legislation published in the of the international medical journal Tobacco Control also
mentioned how the negotiations were carried on in secret:
The beginning of this highly unusual
effort by Philip Morris [to implement its FDA policy goals] began in November 2001 when
secret negotiations, of which many public health advocates were unaware, were initiated
between Philip Morris and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
That the current FDA bill was created
through secret negotiations apparently orchestrated by PM certainly seems to be the case.
No other public health entities with exceptional experience in tobacco control were asked
to participate in formulating the proposed regulations -- no current or former Surgeons
General, no one from the American Association of Public Health Physicians, none of the
many prominent longtime public health advocates around the country with decades of
experience fighting the tobacco industry, and no public health advocacy groups that have
detailed knowledge of tobacco industry strategies or the best track records of success in
reducing public smoking, like Americans for Nonsmokers Rights or the state Groups to
Alleviate Smoking Pollution (GASPs). No scholars in tobacco industry documents or tobacco
policy were invited. The amount of valuable tobacco control expertise and knowledge that
was summarily excluded from the negotiations to create the bill is amazing--and highly
suspect.
CTFK ducked questions about the
"secret negotiations" claims and instead steered us to "FDA" section
of their Website and suggested we contact the Senate sponors of the bill for comment. The
American Cancer Society, which has been fighting tobacco for decades, declined to comment
when asked how they felt about being excluded from the negotiations.
Worrisome as well is the fact that the
tobacco industry has a long record of turning regulation and settlements to great
advantage. As with the 1968 law mandating warning labels on packages, the 1971 law ending
cigarette ads on TV, and the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, over and over PM in
particular has shown that it knows very well exactly what concessions can be made that
will do little harm to tobacco companies while benefiting the industry in the long run.
Giving up TV advertising freed cigarette
companies to spend more money on other beneficial and diverse forms of advertising and
promotion, like ads in newspapers and magazines and on public transport. Agreeing to put
"Surgeon General" warnings on packs handed cigarette companies a shield against
liability, since then they could claim that after a certain date everyone had been warned
of the hazards of smoking. In the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, the industry gave up
advertising on billboards, public transport and ads within a certain distance of schools,
but then concentrated money on targeting young adults en masse through "bar
nights," sponsorship of musical bands, and other novel promotions. By now we know
that the elusiveness and creativity of tobacco companies is unparalleled; they simply
cannot be expected to abide by the spirit of a law.
Who's Making the Big Concessions?
The currently-proposed FDA regulations
may sound good to those not steeped in the tobacco industry's behavioral history or
long-range strategies, but predictably, given PM's involvement in crafting it, the bill is
riddled with loopholes that clearly will benefit the tobacco industry, and leave
protection of public health in the dust.
The bill would assign the task of
chemically modifying cigarettes to the FDA, which not only turns FDA into a de facto
Research & Development arm of the tobacco industry, but virtually assures that only
minor changes will take place in cigarettes, if at all, over a long period of time. After
all, tobacco industry documents show that the industry itself has engaged in secret
research to try to make cigarettes safer by removing specific chemicals from smoke. They
never published the results of their research in peer-reviewed journals, so FDA likely
cannot benefit from it. Evidently tobacco companies were not very successful in this
endeavor, either, since over 400,000 people still die each year in the U.S.from using
their products. So if the tobacco industry can't make cigarettes safer through chemical
alteration, then how can FDA be expected to do it?
The proposed law also presents a
bureaucratic and funding nightmare to FDA, an agency already heavily influenced by
corporations and that already has a remarkably poor track record of protecting consumers.
Under the bill, even the date that the legislation goes into effect must be timed to
minimize economic loss to, or disruption of the cigarette trade--another example of how
the bill elevates the needs of tobacco companies above the need for effective and
immediate action to reduce nicotine addiction.
CTFK and the other voluntary health
groups supporting this bill--American Lung Association, American Heart Association, and
American Cancer Society-- need to answer to the question, "How does passing
legislation that is in the best financial interests of the largest, smartest and most
aggressive tobacco company in the U.S.serve the public health agenda?" The answer is
that it doesn't.
Looking at the whole picture, it appears
that not only has the current FDA-Tobacco situation been engineered by Philip Morris in a
far-reaching plan to enact its own preferred regulations while fracturing the cohesion of
public health groups, but it seems that Congress feels it must kowtow to Philip Morris to
get anything done.
A bill to regulate tobacco products needs
to be crafted solely with public health in mind, and done in a way that assures that it
will advantage no tobacco company over the long or short haul. It should implement a
comprehensive strategy aimed at eventually winding down and ending commercialized nicotine
addiction. In effect, such a bill should be an End-game strategy. The keys to what would
be effective for this are contained in the industry's documents: simply look at what
tobacco companies fight tooth and nail to avoid. At a minimum, legislators and voluntary
health associations should work to enact measures that PM doesn't want, instead of
measures it does want. Government shouldn't be in the business of advancing tobacco
companies' best interests. The regulations that PM works behind the scenes to avoid are
the ones that will truly benefit public health.
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