Big Tobacco’s tricks to stop the antismoking bill from becoming law

It seems South Africa’s long-awaited new anti-tobacco legislation is set to go nowhere slowly — again. 

Last week parliament’s newly appointed portfolio committee on health sat to discuss the proposed new tobacco bill for the first time since South Africa’s post-election government was formed in June.

The contentious Tobacco Products & Electronic Delivery Systems Control Bill has been in the making since 2018, when then health minister Aaron Motsoaledi asked people to comment on proposed new laws that would ban vaping in public spaces and rule that tobacco products like cigarettes and vapes must be sold in plain-looking packaging, as will be decided by the minister. 

But because of pushback, the bill got to parliament only in December 2022.

At Wednesday’s meeting, though, some committee members said they’re worried about the “potential social and economic impacts” of the bill, like job losses, illegal sales and the government losing out on taxes. 

Lekan Ayo-Yusuf, a public health expert at the University of Pretoria and member of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO’s) study group on tobacco regulation, says not only is there no evidence to back up such concerns from impact assessment studies but it could also be taken as calls for the whole public participation process to start from scratch. 

If this were to happen, “it could take years for the bill to pass”, says Ayo-Yusuf — which would play right into the hands of the tobacco industry. 

Swapping smokes

South Africa has to get stricter on tobacco use because the country has signed the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, an international contract in which signatories promise that they will put legislation in place to protect future generations from the health problems linked to smoking, such as cancer and lung and heart diseases.

In 2021, more than a quarter of South Africans older than 15 used tobacco — a worrying figure because already back in 2016, 26,000 people died of smoking-related diseases in the country, costing the government more than R42bn in health-care expenses and lost productivity. 

However, the profits are as addictive as the tobacco that generates them, which means that the industry needs to keep recruiting a new generation of lifetime smokers to fill its pockets. 

Over the past decade, the use of e-cigarettes among teens and young adults exploded. In 2011, about 1.5% of US youths vaped; by 2018 the number was close to 21%. 

Easy flavours, sleek designs and child-friendly packaging are all designed to make these products appeal to children, says a WHO report published in May. 

Moreover, says the report, the tobacco industry promotes its so-called next-generation goods (products that don’t need tobacco to be burnt to give you a kick) as “safer” than old-time cigarettes, even though they still contain nicotine — which makes them no less addictive than cigarettes and means they can be a gateway to smoking.

Because the constitution says every South African must have a chance to weigh in on how laws are made, public hearings on the bill started in August 2023. By February, people in seven of the nine provinces had had a chance to air their views. 

But the meetings then paused ahead of the election — without people in KwaZulu-Natal and the Northern Cape having had their say. 

“I think we will proceed as we have in the past,” said committee chair Sibongiseni Dhlomo on Wednesday, referring to picking up on public hearings where they left off in February.

With Big Tobacco having a long history of trying to interfere with tobacco control policies, industry watchdog Stopping Tobacco Organisations and Products has sent out a list to help governments and citizens see through its tricks.

Here are three tactics Big Tobacco uses to stall the bill’s approval. 

Tactic 1: Twisting the science

The tobacco industry has been called out for manipulating science before. Even though research started linking smoking to cancer back in the 1950s, tobacco companies denied it. Philip Morris International (PMI), for instance, tried to cause doubt and dissuade the public from quitting in the 1960s, saying: “We don't accept the idea that there are harmful agents in tobacco.” 

And still it won’t quit. 

Punting so-called next-generation products like vapes and nicotine pouches as safer than cigarettes, it’s using the idea of harm reduction — an evidence-based way to help reduce the effects an addiction has on someone’s health — to simply hook new clients, experts say.

One way to do this is to fund other research organisations to spread the message.

In 2017, the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World was set up, a nonprofit and seemingly independent organisation that supported harm reduction research, despite being funded by PMI. 

In 2020, the foundation claimed that a study among teens in the US which showed that fruity, chocolate or mint flavours rank third in the list of reasons for kids enjoying vaping was evidence that flavours are not what gets people hooked. 

In an analysis of how the big brand companies skew science to fit their goals, public health policy experts found that attacking research that paints these corporations in a bad light is a typical strategy. For example, a 2020 article in the tobacco-funded Filter magazine called health concerns about e-cigarettes “a fear-driven crusade” of “lies and junk science”. 

Statements like these can influence the public and policymakers’ decisions when given airtime by seemingly impartial groups, such as the organisation that owns the magazine and says its “mission is to advocate through journalism for rational and compassionate approaches to drug use, drug policy and human rights”. 

People who participated in the public hearings said that since vapes and cigarettes are different, they shouldn’t be regulated in the same way, and on Wednesday, some of the members of the portfolio committee asked for “comprehensive data” to compare the health problems that could come from vaping with those linked to traditional smoking. 

Tactic 2: Skewing public opinion surveys 

In 2019, Japan Tobacco International (JTI) published a report based on “a nationally representative survey” that asked people how they felt about plain packaging of tobacco products. 

Though JTI said the research was conducted independently, critics from the Research Unit on the Economics of Excisable Products (Reep) at the University of Cape Town said the study was flawed. For starters, the fact that JTI funded the survey made it biased by definition, they said, and with getting views from only 1,014 people it could not be considered representative of the country’s more than 32-million adults at the time. On top of that Reep called JTI out for using leading questions, which, simply in the way they were phrased, could show an opinion that would fit its narrative. 

Apart from the questionable research method, the report also looked strikingly similar to one JTI had funded on public opinion about plain packaging in the UK.

Plain packaging is a touchy subject. With advertising rules having got tighter over the years — with tobacco advertising not being allowed in films, on TV or in magazines in many countries — Big Tobacco has had to rely on packaging as a marketing tool.

Pictures, colours or even certain words used on cigarette packaging can make the products look attractive or falsely reassure consumers about possible dangers, research says. For example, brands targeted at young people are marketed as less harsh and include descriptions of appealing flavours like mint or strawberry.

Instead, research shows that plain packaging will create negative expectations about the taste of cigarettes and will cut down on its cool factor.

Tactic 3: Causing confusion about illicit trade

One of the main arguments against the tobacco bill is that it could cost South Africa billions in tax revenue. That’s because plain packaging and bans on till displays in shops will encourage smugglers to sell counterfeit products, big names in the tobacco industry say. 

When cigarettes are produced illegally with fake trademarks or sold to customers before taxes are paid on the goods, it is seen as illicit trade.

But research shows that tobacco companies have been exaggerating the size of the illicit market for many years for their own gain. 

Last year, for example, British American Tobacco South Africa claimed that it had to lay off 200 people because of how much the illicit market had grown during the 2020 tobacco ban, which it said made up 70% of the country’s tobacco business. 

The 70% estimate comes from a survey that the tobacco giant paid the market research firm Ipsos to do — except the Ipsos paper doesn’t come to this conclusion. That figure refers only to the proportion of shops that sold illegal cigarettes in one province, while for the country overall, the percentage of stores that sold illicit cigarettes actually dropped from 47% in 2021 to 34% in 2022. In fact, the real share of the tobacco market owned by illicit trade is likely to be closer to 54%.

There’s likely more to Big Tobacco’s concern than meets the eye, experts told Bhekisisa previously. What looks like an industry trying to be a good corporate citizen, they said, is more likely to be a new approach to an old goal: to protect its bottom line. 

This story was produced by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism. Sign up for the newsletter.