This year's World No Tobacco Day campaign strikes at all forms of tobacco use, not just smoking. It is probably not widely known that all forms of tobacco - including "organic" cigarettes, hand-rolled cigarettes, cigars, pipes and snuff - are just as addictive and deadly.
The tobacco industry continues to develop new products and spend heavily on research into new "reduced-harm" products, all of which are still untested for long-term health effects. Meanwhile, users become addicted and the industry's market increases.
Historically, several techniques have been introduced to make supposedly safer cigarettes. To date, none has been proved to produce a safe product. The products that have been in use long enough for their associated health effects to be studied have been shown to remain deadly.
Hand-rolled cigarettes
Increasing numbers of people roll their own cigarettes, partly for cultural reasons and partly to save money owing to the rising costs (including taxes) of commercially manufactured cigarettes.
Bidis are small hand-rolled cigarettes. People tend to smoke them more intensively, puffing more frequently. This results in higher nicotine intake and cardiovascular effect than cigarettes, as well as 2-3 times greater tar inhalation.
Cohort studies have shown bidi smoking to result in high excess mortality from and high risk of the diseases caused by cigarette smoking. Bidi smoking has been associated with a risk of oral cancer three times that for people who have never smoked, and increased risk of cancer of the lung, stomach and oesophagus. Studies have also shown it to be an important risk factor for cardiovascular diseases. The risk of thromboangiitis obliterans is greater with bidi smoking than cigarettes.
Cigars
Cigar smoking causes cancer of the lung, oesophagus, larynx and oral cavity. Even cigar smokers who do not inhale still have a lung cancer risk 2-5 times that of lifelong nonsmokers.
The risk of head and neck cancer and many other diseases is the same as for cigarette smoking. For instance, the relative risk of death from cancer of the oral cavity and pharynx is 7.9 among all cigar smokers, relative to lifelong nonsmokers. It increases with the number of cigars smoked per day to 15.9 in men who smoke 5 or more per day.
Merely holding an unlit cigar in the mouth exposes the user to tobacco and its poisons. This is due to the alkaline nature of the tobacco, as compared with the acidic tobacco of cigarettes. This makes it possible for nicotine to be absorbed even from an unlit cigar.
Pipes
Pipe smokers carry a substantially higher risk of diseases including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, oral, head and neck cancer, laryngeal cancer, oesophageal cancer and lung cancer.
The relative risk for lip cancer associated with pipe smoking is 1.5. A study in China found that the odds ratio for oral cancer among pipe smokers is 5.7 in men and 4.9 in women. These estimates are greater than those associated with cigarette smoking.
Non-combusted "oral" or "smokeless" tobacco products
Oral products are a major form of tobacco addiction in some regions, including snuff or snus in Scandinavia. Their popularity is growing, following increasing marketing efforts by the tobacco industry.
Smokeless tobacco products contain addictive levels of nicotine and many carcinogens, heavy metals and other toxins, although the nicotine and toxin levels vary widely across products. Such products are highly addictive and can cause cancer of the head, neck, throat and oesophagus, as well as many serious oral and dental conditions.
brieftly introduction
Standards of evidence, both scientific and medical, must be met in cases involving large-scale, serious dangers to public health. A strong case can be made for imposing restrictions on the sale, promotion, and even consumption of a certain products, such as cigarettes, which harm public health and the global economy. There is now a substantial body of evidence demonstrating how damaging tobacco use is on individual nations and on the global economy. Because there are now laws restricting tobacco adverting in the U.S, the tobacco market has diminished in the U.S. Therefore, tobacco companies are focusing marketing on Asian countries.
In many Asian countries, smoking is fashionable. And, Asian smokers seem to be susceptible to glitzy advertising campaigns. Smoking American or European cigarettes is seen as "cool." According to The New York Times article "No gift is more appreciated in Vietnam than British-made ‘555' cigarettes. In China, the choice is Marlboro. Among the gentry of Thailand, it is Dunhill"(Shenon, 1994, p.10). “Rates of smoking are extremely high among Asian men: 60 percent in Japan and China, for example, and a whopping 73 percent in Vietnam” (Pollack, 1997. p.1).
Physicians and scientists are concerned about how increased smoking will affect the health of the Asian people. One scientist estimates that "because of increasing tobacco consumption in Asia, the annual worldwide death toll from tobacco-related illnesses will more than triple over the next two or three decades, from about 3 million a year to 10 million a year, a fifth of them in China. His calculations suggest that 50 million Chinese children alive today will eventually die from diseases linked to cigarette smoking" (Shenon, 1994, p.16).
History of the Problem
The tobacco industry, in general, and individual companies, in particular, conduct themselves to ensure a profit from smokers. But, this industry does have many enemies, and the issue that unites these various groups is health. Cigarette smoking has been linked with heart and lung disease and many forms of cancer. Are the giant multinational tobacco companies in financial danger? Probably not, because cigarette use is growing in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and in the former Soviet Union. “In Asia alone, the World Health Organization estimated at the beginning of the 1990s that smoking would increase by one-third during the decade” (Allin, Mossialos, McKee and Holland, 2004, p.82).
While some Asian governments have followed the lead of Western nations and banned tobacco advertising on television and radio, the tobacco companies find ways to get their message to the people-at sporting events, for example, or through clothing that sports cigarette logos. In Japan, the tobacco industry and four multinational tobacco companies have voluntarily developed new, tough advertising standards, effective April 1, 1998. These standards are designed to control smoking by young people (Nakagawa, 1998). In strict Singapore, anti-smoking laws, such as laws against selling cigarettes to minors, carry heavy penalties. Such laws indicate that anti-smoking attitudes of Western countries are finding their way to some Asian countries, (Nakagawa, 1998).
Scope of the problem
The multinational tobacco companies say that they are not trying to get nonsmokers in Asia to start smoking. Instead, they say, they are trying to get Asian people who already smoke to change brands. The evidence suggests otherwise, however. “In previous years, the ministry had tried to include such a section but had been overruled by the more powerful Ministry of Finance, which represents the interests of the tobacco industry (note that the Japanese government owns a major share of Japan Tobacco),” (Pollack, 1997, p.16). In Hong Kong, very few women smoke. Thus, if companies are not interested in creating new smokers, Hong Kong would not appear to be a good market for a cigarette brand aimed at women. “Yet Philip Morris introduced their Virginia Slims brand aimed specifically at women in Hong Kong a few years ago (Shannon, 1994, p.17).
Under the Bush Administration particularly, the US government pushed for agreements that allow free trade in cigarettes, thus ensuring that Asian countries would be open markets for American-based tobacco companies. The 1993 annual report of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco claimed that "today, Reynolds has access to 90 percent of the world's markets, a decade ago, only 40 percent." (Greenberg, 2001, p.101). Clearly, trade negotiators' efforts to support the American tobacco industry have been successful.
Population
China is an especially attractive market to the multinationals because it has “a huge population (1.2 billion people) and a growing economy. The number of smokers in China is greater than the population of the United States” (Shenon, 1994, p.17). Other market groups targeted by the tobacco companies are Asian women and young people. While adult males have been the most common smokers in Asia, advertising aimed particularly at women and young people seek to change that. “Increasing numbers of Asian women see smoking as a sign of their liberation” (Pollack, 199, p.1).
Rationale
There are served reasons why this subject is important to me. It involves large-scale serious danger to public health in Asia and affects my family, and friends, as well as, the health of the next generation. This paper attempts to examine in the case of “cigarette companies who have promoted tobacco use, which is the number one cause of cancer-related death globally” (Williams, 1992, p.74.). The paper also focuses on the efforts to the tobacco companies to target Asian women and young people, and the dangers of passive smoke.
This paper also reflects on the lessons learned from the history of England and its use of drugs in China in the nineteenth century. Because China was richly resources that England did not have, England wanted to have China in its colonial plan. Therefore, “their plans failed Chinese Scholars recognized England’s intention and the result was the opium war” (Waley, 1979, p.15). Now again, Western tobacco companies and politicians uses cigarettes to exploit an in Asian market. Thus, it may be said that the cigarettes companies which have harmed public health in the past continue to the present have been were among the pioneers in the processes of market globalization that we are witnessing today.
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