JOE CAMEL GOES TO EUROPE

In 1986, Witold Zatonski, a Polish physician who brings a missionary's zeal
to his work, told a Washington Post reporter a "state secret": Poland's
Communist rulers contributed to the nation's appalling health problems. The
secret police came knocking on Zatonski's door shortly afterward.

Today the secret police are gone. But Zatonski continues his struggle in
Warsaw, focusing on a new threat to the health of the people of Poland, the
former Soviet empire and the Third World: American tobacco companies.

"You want us to join NATO and fight for the free world," Zatonski said
during a visit to Washington this week. "But how can our children fight for
this if your tobacco companies target them as the replacement market for
sales Philip Morris and others are losing in the United States?"

Zatonski, director of Warsaw's most important cancer research and treatment
center, spluttered as he described big tobacco's push to outflank the
restrictions contained in legislation being shepherded through the Senate
by John McCain, Ron Wyden and others. Sitting beside him was an equally
outraged Mark Palmer, U.S. ambassador to Hungary as the Cold War ended.

The United States and its allies "worked for 45 years to get the Communists
out. And when we did, the Marlboro Man rode into town to claim the
victory," Palmer said. "In Ukraine a few weeks ago I counted 25 billboards
on the way into town from the airport, and 19 were selling cigarettes with
messages that said directly or indirectly: Be American. Smoke American."

In Russia, the first advertisement in Red Square was for a cigarette called
"West," a word symbolizing modernity and freedom to those who had lived
under tyranny. In Poland, L&M cigarettes are advertised as "Really
American." In Hungary, where smoking and tobacco-related deaths have
soared, U.S. companies are expanding free sample promotions and advertising
now being restricted or outlawed in the West.

Palmer, Zatonski and others at the Center for Communications, Health and
the Environment, a Washington public health advocacy group, are sketching
in an important foreign policy component of the American debate about
smoking, health and politics. The next big battlefield concerns America's
responsibility for the enormous cultural and social impact it now has
abroad, where smoking is being marketed as a national U.S. characteristic
others should emulate.

Replacing GI Joe with Joe Camel could harm U.S. national interests. The
argument that the United States will eventually reap a harvest of
resentment and financial claims from abroad rests on two assumptions that I
find persuasive:

One is that American and other Western companies are knowingly preying on
societies that are particularly vulnerable to the marketing of a product
that causes disease and death. The grim public health statistics of the
Communist era were in fact state secrets. These societies have not
developed the public health infrastructure and educational programs that
finally led to declines in smoking in the United States and Western Europe.

"To keep the people quiet, the Communists provided cheap cigarettes, vodka
and fatty sausages," says Zatonski, who was warned but not arrested when he
made similar comments for publication in 1986. "Is it any wonder that the
life expectancy of young males in Russia and much of Eastern Europe today
is lower than in sub-Sahara Africa?"

In former Warsaw Pact countries, in China, India and elsewhere, cigarette
taxes provide a major source of government revenue. Campaign contributions,
or bribery, make the politicians look the other way as smoking skyrockets.
"Governments fight all diseases except tobacco-related disease, which many
of them actually promote," says Palmer.

Second, it is now clear that U.S. companies have decided to make up for
lost profits at home by maximizing profits abroad. Chinese and Hungarian
teenagers are fenced in as American teenagers are fenced out of cigarette
marketing campaigns.

Apparently worried about upsetting the proposed domestic settlement with
the tobacco industry, the Clinton administration has been curiously
reticent about legislative proposals designed to prevent U.S. tobacco
companies from doing abroad what they cannot do at home. U.S. embassies no
longer help promote smoking and cigarette sales overseas, as they once did,
but Palmer and others complain there has been no clear U.S. leadership to
help anti-smoking campaigns abroad.

There should be. Here is a chance for President Clinton to show that he can
do more than deliver apologies abroad. Here, he can take action to prevent
a successor's having to tour Eastern Europe or India one day to apologize
for a lack of American sensitivity to and fair play for the vulnerable
abroad.

© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company