A cigarette company has stunned the public by taking out full-page ads in the United Kingdom declaring that its New Year’s resolution was to “give up cigarettes”.
Philip Morris is a giant tobacco company that produces and markets cigarettes worldwide, including Australia. Its brands include Marlboro, Parliament and Alpine cigarettes, among others.
In the ads, published in newspapers including The Sun, Philip Morris assured readers its “ambition is to stop selling cigarettes in the UK”.
“It won’t be easy. But we are determined to turn our vision into a reality,” the ad says. “There are 7.5 million adults in the UK who smoke. The best action they can take is to quit smoking. Many will succeed.
“But many will continue to smoke. That’s why we want to replace cigarettes with products ... which are a better choice for the millions of men and women in the UK who would otherwise not stop smoking.”
It goes on to state: “No cigarette company has done anything like this before. You might wonder if we really mean it.”
Yet despite the global attention and headlines, this is not a new ambition for the company. Nor is it a new story. The company also wants to “give up” cigarettes in Australia and 30 other countries.
In October last year, the company committed to a “smoke free” Australia in a push to eventually stop producing cigarettes. Its aim was to stop selling cigarettes by 2020. The World Health Organization estimates that there will be more than a billion smokers by 2025.
Philip Morris’s ambition is to help smokers quit the traditional method of smoking and if they can’t quit altogether, replace cigarettes with healthier alternatives like heated tobacco products and e-cigarettes. In the UK, the company also sells several alternatives to cigarettes including a heated tobacco product Iqos. It also the Nicocig, Vivid and Mesh e-cigarette brands.
The company claims alternatives are 95 per cent less harmful than cigarettes.
“I hope by 2020 we stop selling conventional cigarettes if not completely, or handing them over to someone else to worry about,” Australian Paul Riley, Philip Morris’s Japan president, told news.com.au last month.
“If we can go hard enough we’ll be close by the end of 2020 not to have to sell the conventional product (cigarettes).”
However anti-smoking campaigners have dismissed the advertisements as a “PR stunt” that shows the company has “money to burn”.
“Rather than making donations, it should be forced to pay the government more of its enormous profits,” Deborah Arnott, the chief executive of UK charity Action on Smoking, said.
The US Food and Drug Administration is also weighing up whether to approve new Philip Morris products, following reports from staff about irregularities in clinical trials carried out by the company.
The Australian Cancer Council said the relatively new status of e-cigarettes meant “there is not enough data available to determine the long-term health effects”.
“Products delivering chemicals directly to the lung are only approved after extensive evaluation on safety and efficacy. E-cigarettes currently on the market in Australia have not passed through this process and have not been proven safe to use,”
Source news.com.au