Source: Guardian, The (UK) Contact: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ Copyright: Guardian Media Group 1999 Pubdate: Wed, 13 Jan 1999 Section: Leader EXPORTING ADDICTION The Third World counts the cost BAT and Rothmans' marriage has been greeted with delight in the City and with horror amongst the anti-smoking lobby. The two cigarette companies will sell between them 900 billion cigarettes a year. Or, as Dr Richard Peto, the leading Oxford epidemiologist might put it, the cigarettes they produce will kill 900,000 people a year. A growing number of these deaths are in the developing world. Sales of cigarettes in the West are declining by 1 per cent a year, but globally they are growing at 2 per cent a year. At current rates of growth, 10 million people will be dying a year in 2030. The developing world is the target for the two companies. What the tie-up offers, through a range of brands, is the chance of pulling consumers up an escalator from the cheapest, local brands to the most expensive where profit margins are largest. The British Medical Association has called the tobacco companies 'the world's most efficient drug pushers'. There is a deep irony here which seems to speak volumes about the global distribution of power: the export of health-damaging drugs from the developing world to the developed world is banned and huge resources are poured into implementing that ban. Meanwhile, a not dissimilar trade in another type of health-damaging addictive substance from the developed world to the developing world flourishes, and brings huge dividends to shareholders. Just as the British used opium to develop a vast colonial trading network in Asia at huge profit to itself in the 19th century, so the tobacco companies are using cigarettes. Alas, the wheel will have to be reinvented - developing countries will, painfully learn as the West has learnt over the last forty years of the high price for this particular pleasure. Lung cancer rates are shooting through the roof in Sri Lanka and India; governments and anti-smoking campaigns have ahead of them the laborious exercise in educating the public and raising consciousness which is finally bearing fruit in the West. - --- MAP posted-by: Don Beck