Us, humans, are notoriously bad at estimating risk. Most
people fear flying far more than driving, even though the odds of dying in a
car accident (1 in 107 in the US, for example) are far higher than perishing in
an aircraft crash (about 1 in 11 million).
اضافة اعلان
What we are really good at, however, is self-deception.
Take smoking. By now, just about everyone must surely know
that tobacco is extremely bad for us in all kinds of horrible ways, yet every
day millions of smokers and shisha fans ignore the very real risk that their
habit will kill them.
They are taking a 50-50 gamble. Tobacco kills about half of
its users.
Every year, according to the World Health Organization,
smoking prematurely ends the lives of about 8 million people.
Tobacco, it turns out, is an even more effective way of
killing off human beings than war. In the 20th century, conflict,
including the two world wars, killed 72 million people. Tobacco killed 100
million.
And the dying is only the half of it – the path to a
tobacco-induced death is often a long, painful and distressing journey of
suffering for the dying and their loved ones.
Given all that, and the vast cost to health systems around
the world, you would have thought that governments everywhere would be doing
all they could to slay the tobacco dragon. Think again.
As it is being increasingly driven out of markets in Europe
and North America, the tobacco industry is maintaining, and even increasing,
its profits by targeting countries in the Middle East – and doing so often with
the collaboration of governments.
It is no coincidence that, according to the World Health
Organization, more than 80 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion tobacco
users now live in low- and middle-income countries.
In a devil’s deal struck in exchange for highly lucrative
tax incomes, nations throughout the Middle East and North Africa are actively
encouraging and, in some cases, even rewarding the growth of the world’s
deadliest industry.
A
reportpublished this week by the Global Center for Good Governance
in Tobacco Control in collaboration with the WHO’s Eastern
Mediterranean Regional Office exposed industry interference with tobacco
control policies in eight countries – Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman,
Pakistan and Sudan.
Tobacco, it turns out, is an even more effective way of killing off human beings than war. In the 20th century, conflict, including the two world wars, killed 72 million people. Tobacco killed 100 million.
“Every time we trace the lack of progress in any aspect of
tobacco control in individual countries or collectively in the East
Mediterranean Region,” commented Dr. Jawad Al Lawati, a tobacco control
advocate in Oman’s health ministry, “we find the tobacco industry, its local
distributors or front groups and individuals are behind it.”
Oman, it has to be said, emerges well from the Industry
Interference Index 2021 report, banning industry representatives from
public-health policy committees, offering tobacco companies no business
incentives and refusing to enter into industry partnerships.
Oman is an exception, even though all eight countries in the
report are parties to the WHO’s
Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which in theory commits them to
implement tobacco control measures and “protect their health policies from
interference from commercial and other vested interest”.
In Sudan and Iraq, for example, the industry “has found a
way to participate in developing the standards for tobacco products”, with
representatives sitting on various official committees.
In Jordan in 2018, a new factory built by international
tobacco company JTI was given an Environmental Stewardship Award by the
Jordanian environment ministry.
In Egypt, where international tobacco giant Philip Morris
runs training courses for customs officials to combat smuggling that might
undercut its market, the company was presented with a certificate of
appreciation by the finance ministry for paying its taxes on time.
The tobacco industry has long sought to gain leverage and
improve its reputation through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
initiatives, a tactic it perfected in America and Europe as awareness grew
about the dangers of tobacco.
Cynically, having been rumbled in the West, it is now at the
same game in the region – and in various initiatives in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon
and Pakistan, has even exploited the COVID-19 pandemic “to gain public
endorsement and access senior government officials”.
Perhaps the worst example of cynical CSR was in Iraq in
2020, when “the ministry of trade distributed locally produced Somar brand
cigarettes together with the items of the free food ration program distributed
as an assistance to poor families”.
Official conflicts of interest, meanwhile, are rife,
but perhaps the most brazen is the fact that several countries, including
Egypt (Eastern Tobacco Company) and Lebanon (Regie), have state-owned tobacco
companies.
Governments are, quite literally, profiting from the death
of the citizens they are supposed to be protecting.
According to the American Cancer Society’s annual
Tobacco Atlas, in the eight countries featured in the WHO’s Industry
Interference Index, more than 360,000 people die of tobacco-related diseases
every year.
In the time of COVID, we have become used to reading about
unspeakably high death tolls – to date, over 5.7 million lives have been lost
to the coronavirus that emerged in China in December 2019.
The greater risk we are ignoring, however, is that each
and every year the tobacco pandemic, against which the only
vaccination is education and determined public-health policies, kills millions
of people.
The result is the extraordinary and shameful spectacle of
governments doing their best to end the curse of COVID-19, while on the other
hand blithely encouraging the growth of the even more lethal pandemic of
tobacco.
The writer is a British journalist, formerly with The Times,
who has lived and worked in the Middle East and is now based in the UK.
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