HEALTH: Tobacco Smokers Feel Increasingly like Pariahs

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 1 2001 (IPS) - The enormous contraband in cigarettes and the growing number of areas in which smoking is prohibited are making smokers feel more and more like the users of some illegal drug, said observers on Thursday, World No Tobacco Day.

Tobacco is on a route running inverse to that of some illegal drugs like marijuana, whose legalisation is called for by a growing and heterogeneous movement, and the use of which in practice is already tolerated or permitted in some countries.

The director of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Gro Harlem Brundtland, called for a total ban on smoking in public spaces Thursday as part of the campaign in defence of “passive smokers” who themselves do not light up but must breathe in the air contaminated by others.

The WHO estimates the number of tobacco smokers in the world at one billion, who expose another 700 million people to secondhand smoke, which contains nearly 5,000 toxic substances.

Many countries have already adopted bans on smoking in public areas, but such measures generally prohibit the habit in specific areas like airplanes or restaurants.

However, the restrictions are growing, such as in the case of cigarette ads, which are already limited to just a few local media.

“I feel more and more like a pariah, someone who falls outside the scope of the law,” Maria de Oliveira, a public employee in Rio de Janeiro who smokes 30 cigarettes a day, complained to IPS.

To keep costs down, De Oliveira buys her cigarettes on the informal street market, at half the price of legally sold brands.

The cigarettes she smokes are made in Brazil, and supposedly exported – a tactic that many producers resort to in order to obtain tax breaks, since domestic taxes represent 75 percent of the final price charged consumers.

The exported packages are smuggled back into Brazil, and some never even leave the country in the first place.

Street vendors also hawk pirate cigarettes made in Paraguay, under the names of popular Brazilian brands.

Authorities estimate that 30 percent of all cigarettes smoked in Brazil are the product of contraband and/or falsification.

The problem is a global one. An estimated one-third of all cigarettes consumed worldwide are the result of trafficking, a phenomenon that reduces the effectiveness of heavily taxing cigarettes as a factor to dissuade people from smoking, and as a source of tax revenue.

China, the countries of the former Yugoslavia, and Paraguay are the main producers of or transit points for counterfeit cigarettes.

The difference in taxation levels between countries fuels the international trade in cigarettes.

The activity is run by organised criminal bands like those that control the drug trade, according to Gerard Dubois, the president of the French committee against smoking.

Italy’s Finance Ministry calculates that the illegal trade provides employment to more than 20,000 people in that country.

Since the question involves the trafficking of a legal product, smugglers are given softer prison sentences than those handed out to the traffickers of illegal drugs like cocaine or marijuana.

The European Union suspects the transnational tobacco giants of acting as accomplices, given the sheer magnitude of the illegal trade in cigarettes, estimated at 350 billion cigarettes a year.

EU authorities are sceptical that such well-organised companies could be “unaware of the levels at which their products are being sold,” said Luc Verón, the European Commission’s anti-fraud spokesman, in an interview with the Brazilian daily newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo in April.

In the U.S. courts, the European Union has accused the U.S. companies Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds of facilitating contraband.

In an attempt to curb trafficking of cigarettes, Brazil began to charge a 150 percent tax on cigarette exports in 1999. Since then, neighbouring Paraguay and Uruguay have increased their imports of the inputs used to produce cigarettes locally, in many cases under Brazilian brand-names.

In consequence, the Brazilian government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso decided last October to extend the 150 percent tax to leaf tobacco and the paper and filters used in manufacturing cigarettes, which are exported to its neighbours.

But that unilateral measure triggered protests in Paraguay and Uruguay, which threatened to turn the question into a trade dispute that would require the creation of a conflict settlement panel by the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) trade bloc, which links those three countries and Argentina.

Whether due to the enormous contraband or the steady expansion of no-smoking areas, smokers are receiving treatment that is becoming more and more similar to that given those who use the illegal drugs that are dealt with exclusively as a matter for the police.

Tobacco, accused of killing four million people a year worldwide, 80,000 of whom are in Brazil, is facing heavy pressure from several corners. The industry, however, is not only extremely powerful, but it can hold up the fact that it creates 100 million jobs.