How Big Tobacco thumbs its nose at the ACCC
Simon Chapman, Professor of Public Health at the University of Sydney and anti-tobacco campaigner, in www.crikey.com 23/8/05:

Back in May this year, the ACCC reached "court-enforceable undertakings" from British American Tobacco Australia Limited and Philip Morris Limited to remove the misleading terms "light", "mild" and similar descriptors from their products. They also extracted $8 million from the two companies to go toward anti-smoking campaigns.

Three months later, the brands with the banned terms are still all over the shelves, the companies have introduced new descriptors like "fine" and "smooth" which many smokers understand as being synonyms for the banned terms, and the promised anti-smoking campaigns are nowhere to be seen.

The third company operating in Australia, Imperial Tobacco, gave the finger to the ACCC, effectively telling Graeme Samuel to go and get a real job, and refused to drop the misleading terms. In what has to be the biggest regulatory eunuch performance in Australian corporate history, the ACCC's website excoriated Imperial with words guaranteed to terrorise the recalcitrant company into early submission: "Imperial Tobacco's attitude demonstrates significant lack of sensitivity and responsiveness to community concerns and expectations on this issue." So there!

The lights and mild deception went on for over 20 years. Today, over half of smokers believe those brands are somehow less dangerous. This was a major consumer fraud that caused literally millions of Australian smokers over the years to take some comfort that perhaps their smoking wasn't doing them that much harm. Switch rather than quit was the industry objective which would have caused the deaths of thousands. With the ongoing farce of the ACCC not having the money to see the companies in court, the message is clear to the tobacco industry: do whatever you like.

Australian tobacco control has the best record in the world. No nation has seen smoking rates fall as far as we have. The national "every cigarette is doing you damage" campaign is now being used by over 25 countries. Its architects have not received as much as a single phone call from the ACCC asking advice on how to spend the $8m.