Government should protect us from the vested interests of tobacco control
Interesting if not unexpected response from the Department of Health to a question by Conservative MP Philip Davies.
Davies asked the Secretary of State for Health "if he will make it his policy to require that organisations which engage with his Department on tobacco control issues disclose whether they are linked to or receive funding from (a) the pharmaceutical industry and (b) the public purse".
In response, public health minister Anne Milton replied:
The Government are under obligation to protect [my emphasis] tobacco control from the vested interests of the tobacco industry, under The World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
Our policy on this is set out in Chapter 10 of 'Healthy Lives, Healthy People: A Tobacco Control Plan for England'. This does not extend beyond the tobacco industry and the Department, as with all other policy areas, engages with a wide range of stakeholders including the pharmaceutical industry, organisations in receipt of funding from the pharmaceutical industry and organisations in receipt of funding from the public purse.
In other words, the Government is admitting, without embarrassment, that it consults with groups that receive funding from the pharmaceutical industry – a "vested interest" if ever there was one – and the public purse (which takes us back to our Government Lobbying Government report).
It won't surprise you to learn that the "wide range of stakeholders" the Department of Health "engages with" doesn't include the tobacco industry or consumer groups like Forest.
In the words of one observer, "It seems that Milton is openly acknowledging that DoH is lobbied by organisations funded by DoH, and they are happy to speak with some ‘vested interest’ groups but not others.
Nothing new there, but what a way to run a country. Worse than MPs expenses, in my view.
As for the Government's "obligation to protect tobacco control from the vested interests of the tobacco industry", doesn't the Government have an obligation to protect consumers from the vested interests of the pharmaceutical industry?
There's a campaign in there somewhere.
Talking of Big Pharma, I am reminded of this passage from Joe Jackson's 2007 essay Smoke, Lies and the Nanny State:
Just as Nature abhors a vacuum, other interests have moved into some of the spaces left by Big Tobacco. Foremost among these is one whose wealth, power and influence are now soaring to heights unimaginable 20 or 30 years ago: Big Pharma, or the pharmaceutical industry.
It never ceases to amaze me that people do not see the vested interests on both sides of any debate about tobacco. Of course arguments should be judged on their own merits. But if antismokers are going to make so much of the Big Tobacco connection - to the point of branding all dissent ‘tobacco industry propaganda’ whether or not there is any connection - then it should at least be noted that they too are open to accusations of bias.
There are over 1.2 billion smokers in the world. Convince them all that smoking kills, and that they are addicts needing therapeutic help, and you have a colossal market for pharmaceutical nicotine, in the form of patches, gums and inhalers. Smokers are also a target market for antidepressant drugs.
So it’s no coincidence that Big Pharma is now a major driving force of the antismoking movement. Johnson and Johnson, through its Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has spent over half a billion dollars on antismoking campaigns. Much of the research cited by antismokers is financed in one way or another by pharmaceutical companies.
There are countless examples of drug companies rewarding politicians who take an antismoking stance: Novartis, a maker of nicotine patches, is a donor to the UK Labour party, and has been trying to work with the government to make their products available through the National Health Service, while the health minister responsible for the Italian smoking ban is currently on trial for corruption involving Pharma paybacks.