The tobacco giants are creative in coming up with new products to addict young customers and kill their old ones with cancer. They’re also equally inventive in lobbying lawmakers and finding accomplices among business associations, such as the European Business Association and American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, to carry their water.
From vaping to “heat sticks” like iQOS, the tobacco industry’s game has been to find new ways to deliver nicotine since traditional cigarettes fell out of favor. In doing so, they stay ahead of regulators and public health advocates who have waged effective campaigns to reduce smoking. These public health champions did so with these pillars: high taxes, advertising bans, warning labels on packs (and, recently, plain packaging), indoor smoking bans and public education.
There’s no evidence to suggest that the “heat sticks” are any less deadly than traditional cigarettes, yet they are not regulated in Ukraine as tobacco products — meaning they can be marketed to children. In fact, Philip Morris Ukraine and British American Tobacco have been caught selling and delivering their heated tobacco products to minors, said Lilia Olefir, executive director of Life, a non-profit organization that promotes strong anti-tobacco legislation.
Ukraine’s government took the right step last year by tripling the excise tax for heated tobacco products to bring it in line with the rate for traditional cigarettes. This is a win-win-win-win: High prices discourage young smokers, encourage older smokers to quit, improve public health and bolster tax revenues. (For an excellent overview, see Kyiv Post staff writer Anna Myroniuk’s coverage of the tax dispute.)
Still, Ukraine’s cigarettes are among the cheapest in the world — allowing domestic factories run by Philip Morris International, Japan Tobacco International, Imperial Tobacco, and British American Tobacco — to overproduce and look the other way as cheap surplus cigarettes get illegally smuggled to European Union nations, where cigarette taxes are higher.
Like pouting babies, tobacco companies have threatened to pull out of Ukraine if they don’t get their taxes reduced by 30%. To that, we say: 1. It’s a bluff (tobacco companies love Ukraine’s cheap labor and lawmakers) and 2. If it’s not a bluff, good riddance. The big four, combined with monopoly tobacco distributor Tedis Ukraine, are cancers on Ukrainian society.
They’ve got powerful allies, however. David Arakhamia, leader of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ruling 245-member Servant of the People faction, is in Big Tobacco’s corner. So are the EBA and ACC. Olefir says the EBA has reliably lobbied the tobacco industry’s interests for a long time. So has the ACC. In opposing the tax increase, the ACC said on Feb. 23, 2021: “Such a sharp increase in tax can lead to devastating consequences for the market and the economy of the country…” It looks as if it was written by the tobacco industry, proven liars. Philip Morris once laid out its strategy to addict children: “Today’s teenager is tomorrow’s potential regular customer, and the overwhelming majority of smokers first begin to smoke while still in their teens…The smoking patterns of teenagers are particularly important to Philip Morris.”
The Kyiv Post is a member of the EBA and ACC. But to retain credibility, these associations should choose public health over lobbying the interests of an industry whose products kill nearly 100,000 Ukrainians each year
