Word: tobacco
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...because the excess U.S. tobacco was of poor quality and at best crudely refined, and because foreign smokers too were lighting up less frequently, the U.S. companies found their cigarettes couldn't compete in the cutthroat European and Japanese markets. Anywhere in the developed world, the problems were the same. As Robert Wagman of the North American Newspaper Alliance explained. "The tobacco companies . . . need consumers who will consume high tar tobacco in blissful ignorance of the danger it poses to their health...
They found such consumers in the Third World. The growth in the past decade of the Third World tobacco market, particularly in Africa and Latin America, has been phenomenal, surpassing the tobacco companies' wildest hopes. There, the American firms take advantage of the freedom from restriction they find in less developed countries, where a pack of Marlboros isn't required to carry a health warning. The same U.S. law which requires such warnings in the U.S. exempts the tobacco companies from providing them abroad. Such inequities deprive consumers in the world's least developed regions of the ability to make...
...double standard practiced by tobacco companies not end with marketing techniques. Hooked American smokers, fearful of tobacco's health hazards, can at least turn to safer "low tar" cigarettes. Instead of defiantly boasting "I'd rather fight than switch," health-conscious smokes can mumble, "Well, I guess I'd rather switch than wait to see which gets me first--the cardiovascular disease or the lung cancer." But low tar cigarettes cost firms like Philip Morris much more to produce than the high-tar variety. As a result, the tobacco sold abroad contains much higher tar levels than domestic cigarettes...
DESPITE THE VALIANT EFFORTS of international organizations like the World Health Organization, the tobacco firms seem unlikely to start policing their own operation. For every dollar spent trying to educate Third World smokers about the health consequences of their habit, the tobacco companies spend $10 to $20 on advertising. The ACSR labeled Philip Morris' response to a shareholder resolution last year concerning the company's activities in the Third World "callous and misleading." And the governments of victimized Third World nations also offer little hope for a solution--many have yet to recognize the health hazards that await, and where...
Until Congress awakens to the deadly ramifications of U.S. tobacco trade, the problem will remain intractable. But powerlessness should not excuse Harvard from adopting a policy of divestiture of its Philip Morris stock. Even if divestiture dots nothing to force Philip Morris to alter its foreign trade practices, the moral justification for financially supporting tobacco production and export is even thinner than for investing in South Africa or nuclear weapons production, the other hotly debated divestiture issues. Continuing to ignore--or worse, endorse--the injustice our tobacco industry imposes crisis. Instead, our silence will not add to our responsibility...