EXPORTING ADDICTION

The Third World counts the cost

BAT and Rothmans' marriage has been greeted with delight in the City and
with horror amongst the anti-smoking lobby.

The two cigarette companies will sell between them 900 billion cigarettes a
year. Or, as Dr Richard Peto, the leading Oxford epidemiologist might put
it, the cigarettes they produce will kill 900,000 people a year. A growing
number of these deaths are in the developing world.

Sales of cigarettes in the West are declining by 1 per cent a year, but
globally they are growing at 2 per cent a year. At current rates of growth,
10 million people will be dying a year in 2030. The developing world is the
target for the two companies.

What the tie-up offers, through a range of brands, is the chance of pulling
consumers up an escalator from the cheapest, local brands to the most
expensive where profit margins are largest.

The British Medical Association has called the tobacco companies 'the
world's most efficient drug pushers'. There is a deep irony here which seems
to speak volumes about the global distribution of power: the export of
health-damaging drugs from the developing world to the developed world is
banned and huge resources are poured into implementing that ban.

Meanwhile, a not dissimilar trade in another type of health-damaging
addictive substance from the developed world to the developing world
flourishes, and brings huge dividends to shareholders. Just as the British
used opium to develop a vast colonial trading network in Asia at huge profit
to itself in the 19th century, so the tobacco companies are using
cigarettes.

Alas, the wheel will have to be reinvented - developing countries will,
painfully learn as the West has learnt over the last forty years of the high
price for this particular pleasure.

Lung cancer rates are shooting through the roof in Sri Lanka and India;
governments and anti-smoking campaigns have ahead of them the laborious
exercise in educating the public and raising consciousness which is finally
bearing fruit in the West.