June 25, 1997

By seeking to ape this sorry American model, your ministry and your government are behaving in a highly irresponsible manner, and with a duplicity that is beneath contempt.

Why do we say that?

To begin with, you characterize your actions as a way to get tobacco companies to pay up for what their actions cost society.

Two wrong assumptions. Smokers are already paying their way, Ms. McPhail, and it is they -- not the tobacco companies -- who will pay what you are demanding if you get your way.

Studies in the U.S. and Canada have repeatedly shown that, all told, the taxes smokers pay exceed the costs of smoking to the health and social welfare system. Annual revenues from federal and provincial taxes on smoking exceed the profits realized by the tobacco industry itself! The industry pays nearly $500 million in taxes annually to the B.C. government, tax that ultimately comes from the after-tax income of B.C. residents who smoke.

"Put bluntly, the state treasuries are probably benefitting by smoking," writes Prof. Michael DeBow of The Cumberland School of Law and a member of a State of Alabama task force looking into the advisability of Medicaid lawsuits against tobacco companies, in a recent public policy paper on the subject.

Smokers are paying their way. But you want them to pay more because B.C.'s government is in search of new sources of revenue.

Attempting to extort money from a legitimate business -- while making the largest share of the profit from the product that business is selling -- puts your government well into the category of gangsterism. And gangsters belong in jail, Mrs. McPhail!

If you do succeed in extorting money from the tobacco companies, those companies will simply raise the price of cigarettes to compensate. Smokers -- a group which is increasingly concentrated in the lower socioeconomic bracket of society -- will pay the tab for your ingenious money-grab. It is ironic that the NDP should be the ones to so cynically disguise a tax on the poor as a victory for corporate accountability.

Incidentally, the U.S. tobacco settlement calls for regulation of nicotine as a drug, a move which many see as the precursor for an all-out tobacco ban. Is your government planning to similarly pave the way toward the criminalization of one-quarter to one-third of the population? Do you propose, for example, to ban smoking in homes where there are children, so that you may remove the children of smokers to the care of the state, under the pretext of "child abuse?"

Your allegations about smokers' costs to society are false. Your political justifications -- that you act to protect the health of young people -- are pretentious and unconvincing.

Even the information that your government disseminates to British Columbians about tobacco and health is wonky. We refer, for example, to the highly dubious figure of 5,800 deaths annually in B.C.that you claim are due to smoking (until your latest advertising campaign, the figure, as posted in B.C. retail outlets, was 5,000. Has tobacco become more lethal over the past few months?). Then there's the spurious claim -- also featured in this new ad campaign -- of over $1.5 billion total that smoking costs yearly in B.C. In April, according to newspaper reports quoting you, it was a mere $1 billion. What's changed in the last eight weeks or so? And precisely how do you arrive at these "total cost" estimates when direct health care costs due to smoking are, to use your own numbers, about $500 million? Your figures are flawed, manipulated, or just plain false. This is spin-doctoring that misleads the public, and does nothing to promote a full and fair public debate on the issues.

Finally, your war on tobacco represents bad public policy which will set very, very bad American-style precedents.

Do you want us to become a nation of run-away litigators? Already a lawsuit has been filed in Washington State by a man who says the dairies didn't warn him about the health effects of fat from drinking milk! Concerns are now being raised in the U.S. about the launching of lawsuits against fast- food manufacturers, and other companies, under similar pretexts.

Unlikely scenarios? Let's look at what is fuelling this litigation festival in the United States. Of the few tobacco-suing states which have revealed the information, at least five have promised 25 per cent of their financial recovery to the private law firms helping to handle the prosecutions! The motivation is clear: millions and millions of dollars that will NOT go toward the health care system. Millions and millions of dollars worth of motivation for aiming the same legal tools in whatever new direction seems most profitable.

It is time for smokers, over one quarter of the population unlucky enough to be under your rule, to react and fight back against a campaign that is NOT primarily about health, but about money-hungry governments exploiting and encouraging a socially dangerous "moral crusade".

You are deceiving the people you govern.

The present B.C. government should be investigated and sued for this unwholesome, dishonest money- grab. Your government should be held to account for the damage it is doing to the civic and social health of this province.

With the deepest contempt,

Gian Turci,
President,
FORCES Canada


cc. various B.C. media