Blowing Smoke Rings

By Emil Gullermo

As domestic antismoking battles continue American companies have been
increasingly looking abroad for new smokers specifically, in Third
World

Asian countries. Big Tobacco Is replacing every dead American smoker with
a young soon to be addicted Asian smoker.

But that is seen here as a foreign trade issue, not a health or moral
issue. That's why, when the big accord was announced, there was a strange
euphoria. State attorneys general and Big Tobacco's law firms smiled so
much, you'd think they were in bed together. Did they light up afterward
in honor of their backroom legal tryst?

It sure was good for both of them.

In return for tossing out more than 40 lawsuits and 17 class action
suits, the states got tobacco companies to pay $368.5 billion in the
first 25 years, and $15 billion a year thereafter.

The settlement could stabilize the multimilliondollar industry. It
doesn't make the dent in the tobacco business that we were all led to
believe. No matter how stringent a domestic settlement might sound,
tobacco's future is not in America, but rather in Asia, where the spread
of death by cigarettes continues unfettered.

One attorney general proclaimed in glee, "The Marlboro Man will be
riding into the sunset on Joe Camel." Maybe, but the grizzled cowpuncher
will be galloping through the Far East, bigger and stronger than ever,
riding roughshod over a new group of addicts, most of them Asian. This,
said one antismoking activist, is a renewal of the Opium Wars.

The numbers tell the story. In developed countries like the U.S., the
World Health Organization estimates that 300 millIon people smoke. In
developing countries, the number of smokers exceeds 800 million.

TOBACCO companies have long seen the writing on the wall. For years,
exports have been the answer to smoking's decline at home. Traditionally,
Western Europe and Latin America have been the focus, adding roughly 4
billion a year in profits to tobacco companies.

But in the last 15 years the new mass market is Asia, notably Thailand,
Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and China where there are 300 million smokers
alone.

In the past, Asian staterun monopolies have hampered efforts by U.S.
tobacco to take a foothold. And though those monopolies sound horrible
themselves, they have emerged as a lesser of two evils.

The state run firms tend to make inferior products and have terrible
marketing plans. Smoking is seen as unattractive. Fewer people tend to
smoke. Consequently, fewer tend to die.

But Big Tobacco has been smart. While fighting the U.S. government over
smoking domestically, It's enlisted a big ally to boost foreign sales:
that same government. With help especially from the Reagan and Bush
administrations, the government has helped tobacco companies rack up
larger profits than ever before.

The government's biggest battering ram has been its bullyish use of
Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act. It allowed the U.S. Trade
Representative not only to investigate unfair trade practices, but
enabled Washington to invoke retaliatory sanctions against countries. It
worked like magic against Japan.

By September 1986, with Section 301 retaliation documents set to go to
the president, Japan gave in. Today American cigarette exports are 21
percent of the Japanese market and earn $7 billion in annual sales.
Female smoking is at an alltime high, and female college freshmen are
four times more likely to smoke than their mothers.

One by one, Asian countries have opened up to American tobacco. In 1994,
almost 700 billion cigarettes were sold outside the United States. So
far, China has been the most resistant, but American companies have a 3
percent share and spend more than $40 million in advertising there.

Epidemiologist Richard Peto of Oxford University says worldwide smoking
deaths number 3 million per year. In China alone, 50 million who are
currently 18 or younger will eventually die from smokingrelated
diseases.

As Clinton and Congress scrutinize the tobacco pact, they shouldn't
dismiss the Asian factor. Until it's addressed, any punitive measure
against Big Tobacco is just a slap on the wrist.

The exporting of death remains a loophole for American companies, a
giantsized smoke ring.

Emil Guillermo, former host of NPR's 'All

Things Considered," can be contacted at 5104644545

or via email emilamok@compuserve.com