How the Conservatives are gutting tobacco control

About a month ago, Ottawa quietly announced it was slashing $15 million from Canada’s Federal Tobacco Control Strategy, one of the many cuts to the federal budget. Haven’t seen it in the headlines much? It might be because this is far from the first time the federal Conservatives have swung the axe at the national tobacco control budget. Over the last six years, funding for the FTCS has shrunk by nearly 60 per cent, down to $28 million in fiscal 2012 from $68 million in 2006.

Bain Capital & Big Tobacco: Romney’s Firm Profited From U.S.-Russia Cigarette Deals & Privatizations

An explosive report sheds new light on Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s time at Bain & Company, describing how the firm made millions on big tobacco by helping Philip Morris increase its revenues in the United States, and aiding two other tobacco titans to dominate the Russian market. According to the Huffington Post, "Romney’s consultants helped foreign firms and aspiring oligarchs decide how to corral Russia’s riches — including writing a official manual that outlined how best to navigate the process. At the same time, Bain leveraged its contacts with senior Russian officials to arrange sweetheart deals for its tobacco clients." We’re joined by Zach Carter, senior political economy reporter at the Huffington Post.

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Tobacco company knew smoking was deadly in the ’80s, memo shows

MONTREAL—An internal memo showing that Imperial Tobacco has known cigarettes to be deadly and addictive since the 1980s has been entered into evidence in Quebec’s $27 billion class-action lawsuit against Big Tobacco, despite repeated objections from the company’s lawyers.

In the memo, Bob Bexon, Imperial Tobacco’s former director of Marketing Research and Development, admits that the only thing keeping tobacco companies in business is the addictiveness of cigarettes.

“The only remaining ‘benefit’ of cigarette smoking is the psychological assist it provides in terms of stress reduction,” Bexon writes in the confidential memo. “If our product was not addictive we would not sell a single cigarette next week in spite of these positive psychological attributes.”

Where there's smoke, there's fire: Danielle Smith and Big Tobacco

The leaders of all Alberta parties but one seem committed to ending smoking by young Albertans. The sole holdout? It's the Wildrose Party, led by former Fraser Institute apparatchik Danielle Smith, of course.

This much was reported by the Calgary Herald last Tuesday, although readers are forgiven if they missed it since the story ended up on page 18.

"Only Smith said she wouldn't support the majority of the measures," wrote the Herald's reporter in her coverage of a survey of party leaders by the Campaign for a Smoke-Free Alberta, adding in explanation: "The Wildrose Party has vowed not to raise taxes, including taxes on tobacco products."

Most readers presumably simply assumed that this was just another pre-election pledge not to raise taxes by the right-wing party committed to reviving the low-tax "Alberta Advantage" of Ralph Klein, one of the gods in the Wildrosers' Tea Party pantheon.

So it's unlikely many readers were troubled by the lack of any reference to the cozy relationships among Smith, various far-right Astroturf and propaganda organizations and the tobacco industry.

Murdoch's ties to big tobacco

Rupert Murdoch's phone-hacking problems have been all over the news in recent days, but it wasn't too long ago his media properties were providing a supportive environment for Big Tobacco that went largely unreported.

Murdoch's connection to Philip Morris Co. was revealed through secret industry documents made public as a result of the landmark 1998 U.S. tobacco industry settlement.

The 1981 publication of a Japanese study suggesting that non-smoking wives of smoking husbands were more likely than wives of non-smokers to get lung cancer shocked the industry. Big Tobacco realized that second-hand smoke would be the greatest threat it had encountered, more potentially damaging than earlier studies linking smoking with lung cancer, heart disease and other illnesses.