Lighting Up World of Smokers

By SONNI EFRON

Sept. 8, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

TOKYO —

The label on the side of Japanese cigarette packages reads: “Smoking too much can damage your health, so please be careful. Please observe good manners when smoking.”

As the wording of that caveat indicates, smoking in Japan is considered as much a problem of politeness toward nonsmokers as a threat to public health. The warning also illustrates how, as the Clinton administration mounts its new crusade against teenage smoking, anti-tobacco efforts have just begun in much of the world, where smoking remains socially acceptable.

To be sure, the message that smoking is a health menace is making headway. Even the most indifferent governments organize quit-smoking events one day a year. Lighting up is no longer allowed on French domestic flights, in Israeli cinemas and in China’s Great Hall of the People, where the parliament meets. Poland has banned vending-machine sales.

Workplace segregation of smokers and nonsmokers is showing signs of catching on, and smoke-free zones are appearing even in some developing nations, especially in hotels, restaurants and airports that cater to foreigners.

But enforcement of smoking bans is often laughable. Many smokers view their habit as a God-given right, and in some countries heavy-smoking politicians have personally stymied anti-tobacco efforts.

Although tobacco companies are on the defensive in the United States and Canada, they are clearly winning the battle for the hearts and lungs of most of the peoples on planet Earth. The World Health Organization reports that 1.1 billion people worldwide smoke, including nearly half of all males. Cigarette consumption by people 15 years old and older increased 18% between the early 1970s and the early 1990s. During that period, a drop in smoking rates in the United States and other established market economies was more than offset by a continuing surge in the former Communist countries and the developing world.

China alone has 350 million smokers, more than the population of the United States. About 3 million new Chinese smokers begin puffing every year. In contrast, South Africa, by mounting one of the world’s most intense and systematic anti-smoking campaigns, has managed to persuade about half a million smokers to quit in the last year. According to a recent survey by the government-supported Medical Research Council, about 32% of the adult population now smokes down from 34% a year ago.

North/South Divide

Getting smokers to stop, of course, is much harder than keeping them from starting. Anti-smoking activists allege that cigarettes sold abroad contain higher doses of addictive chemicals than those sold in the United States. Marketing those cigarettes to young people is easier in developing countries where there are few or no militant anti-smoking groups and governments face far more urgent problems than tobacco use.

So just as many Americans are deciding to quit--or being shamed or shunned into stopping--around the world a giant new generation of smokers is being born.

“For every person who stops smoking in the North, two start smoking in the South,” said Leonardo Daino, director of the anti-tobacco campaign of the Argentine League Against Cancer, referring to the shift in smoking from the developed to the developing nations.

The prime markets are Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, China, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe--in short, the world’s most populous regions.

In Russia, colorful ads for Western cigarettes are splashed over once-stark bus stops, billboards and subway walls. A new law requires that warnings about the dangers of smoking occupy 5% of the space on the advertisement, but the disclaimers rarely appear.

The ads often feature stereotypical images of the American good life: sexy women and beautiful scenery. One ad shows a package of L&M; cigarettes superimposed on a snapshot of the Golden Gate Bridge and bears the slogan: “Date With America.”

Russian Health Ministry officials blame such ads for luring children to cigarettes ever earlier in life. Some Russians now take their first puffs at age 10 or 12. The Health Ministry says that by age 17, 53% of Russian boys and 28% of girls have become smokers.

In China, 16% of elementary and high school pupils surveyed said they were regular smokers, and 33% had tried cigarettes, according to the official People’s Daily.

Laws against underage smoking are routinely ignored even in countries that pride themselves on the law-abiding nature of their citizenry. British law bans cigarette sales to anyone younger than 16, but a quarter of all 15-year-olds admit to being regular smokers.

Hooking the Young

Childhood habits are especially hard to break. In France, the average age at which people start smoking is 14. By age 18, 58% smoke. Isabelle Vannier, 34, started smoking rather late, at 16 or 17. She has cut back from two packs of Marlboros or Gauloises a day to less than a pack of low-tar lights. She is aware of the hazards of smoking--she considers nicotine a drug and can’t stand other people’s smoke--but she still loves a cigarette after a meal.

“Smoking is part of life, part of being human,” she said.

In Japan, smoking is a social activity, and some people say they smoke to keep their friends company.

Nearly 59% of adult men in Japan still smoke, although that number is down from 80% in the 1960s. Just this year, the government introduced the first guidelines--not laws--establishing smoke-free spaces in public buildings. Cigarette commercials are legal here, but the industry restricts itself to running them on late-night television. Leaders of a nearly invisible anti-smoking movement complain that cigarette consumption by minors has grown fivefold in less than 20 years.

More and more young Japanese women are smoking. It used to be considered unladylike; now, many say it looks chic.

Hollywood may be under pressure not to glamorize smoking, but in other countries filmmakers and movie stars feel no such constraints. Buenos Aires is plastered with billboards showing Spanish-born movie idol Antonio Banderas cupping a Parliament in his hands, looking pensive and dashing.

Analysts in South America expect that President Clinton’s crackdown in the United States will spur tobacco companies to redouble their efforts in Argentina and Brazil, the continent’s two wealthiest nations.

To keep from being shut out of overseas markets by tariffs on foreign cigarettes, the tobacco companies are investing abroad. Philip Morris Co., R.J. Reynolds Tobacco International and British and American Tobacco Industries (BAT) have purchased controlling shares in Russian tobacco factories. Philip Morris also has a joint venture with the China National Tobacco Corp. to manufacture Marlboros in Shanghai and Ningbo.

Tobacco companies are among the most successful foreign firms operating in Japan. Since the cigarette market was liberalized in 1985, their share of the market has zoomed from less than 3% to about 20%. Unlike such products as beef and rice, there are no tariffs on imported cigarettes.

Many governments have little incentive to crack down on smoking because they own shares in lucrative national tobacco companies or derive significant income from cigarette excise taxes.

In Brazil, tobacco is the biggest source of tax revenue; 74% of the price of a package of cigarettes lands in government coffers. Although it remains the world’s leading exporter of tobacco, Brazil recently instituted tough new bans on smoking in public places. Enforcement remains to be seen.

In China, government dependence on tobacco revenues is seen as the prime obstacle to anti-smoking efforts. The economics are staggering: 1.7 trillion cigarettes are sold each year in China, enough to supply every man, woman and child with more than 70 packs. Ten million Chinese work in the tobacco industry. Tobacco sales are worth $24 billion a year and are growing 18% annually. Cigarette taxes amount to $9 billion a year, about 12% of the central government’s revenue.

Still, Beijing plans to ban all tobacco advertising by the year 2000. About 30 Chinese cities have banned smoking in such public places as hospitals, libraries and sports stadiums, but the laws are widely flouted. Fines for violators run about $1.20--less than a pack of the popular BAT cigarettes called State Express 555.

In the expensive struggle for potential smokers, public health officials are often outspent by the tobacco companies in both developed and developing nations.

The British government, for example, earmarks about $15.6 million a year to publicize its anti-smoking message; the tobacco industry spends about 10 times that amount to advertise cigarettes.

In Poland, Camel ran a promotional sweepstakes in 1994 in which the winners’ names were drawn on the day of a government-sponsored smoke-out. Camel gave away an Opel Frontera car, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a trip for two to Egypt and 500 T-shirts. Top prize for the quit-smoking contest was a getaway to Rome.

The Ad Wars

More and more governments are fighting back by restricting cigarette advertising.

South Africa has banned cigarette commercials on TV, although cigarette ads blare constantly on radio, a far more pervasive medium among the rural poor. Many of the ads target black women, few of whom now smoke. Last year the Health Ministry ordered radio stations to air one public health “counter-advertisement” for each cigarette ad they accept.

But as fast as countries adopt advertising restrictions, the tobacco companies find ways to circumvent them. In Israel, which bans TV and radio ads, R.J. Reynolds dotted Tel Aviv beaches with sun parasols using the name and signature colors of the cigarette company without specifying the product.

A favorite tobacco company tactic, employed worldwide, is to display their logos prominently when they sponsor high-profile sports contests, cultural events or rock concerts that are broadcast on television.

China now has the Beijing tennis tournament sponsored by Salem, a bridge championship sponsored by Philip Morris, a Marlboro Soccer League and the 555 Hong Kong-Beijing car race. Free tickets for that race, printed with the 555 logo, were distributed in Beijing elementary schools.

In Canada, where tobacco companies sponsor not only sporting events but violin concertos, the Montreal Jazz Festival and the Toronto Film Festival, the sponsorship issue is being hotly debated.

Canada has long had stiffer anti-tobacco laws than has the U.S., but last year its landmark law banning cigarette advertising was struck down by the Supreme Court as a violation of free expression.

Earlier this year, the government promised to introduce legislation that would reassert the ad ban, open the door to regulation of tobacco as a controlled substance and place a de facto ban on sponsorship of sporting events. The arts community, which faces a drastic loss of income, has sided with the tobacco companies against the government proposals.

The Vices of Kings

Although scant attention is paid to the smoking habits of the world’s leaders, there is a rough if unscientific correlation between the vices of kings and those of commoners.

For example, South Africa’s landmark anti-smoking campaign is presided over by President Nelson Mandela, who quit the habit during his 27 years in prison and has banned smoking in Cabinet meetings.

Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, a well-known chain-smoker, reportedly recently quit. Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto goes through as many as two packs of heavy-tar cigarettes a day.

In the Czech Republic, anti-smoking legislation was beaten back last year with the approval of such Communist-era dissidents as President Vaclav Havel; restrictions on smoking were seen as undemocratic and smacked too much of old-style censorship. Havel, a hard-core smoker who once set off a safety alert by lighting up in a Czech nuclear power plant where smoking was banned, said he does not object to efforts to protect Czech health but opposes measures that damage the Czech economy.

When Israel’s law banning smoking in the workplace was passed in 1994, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a heavy smoker who was also serving as health minister, refused to sign it. The law languished for months until a new health minister signed it.

Contributing to this report were: Times staff writers Dean Murphy in Warsaw, Bob Drogin in Johannesburg, South Africa, Craig Turner in Toronto, Juanita Darling in San Salvador and Sebastian Rotella in Buenos Aires; and researchers Christine Kiernan in Moscow, Anthony Kuhn in Beijing, Efrat Shvily in Jerusalem, Sarah White and Christine Winner in Paris and Janet Stobart in London.

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Heaviest Smokers

Cigarette consumption per capita of people age 15 and older

1. Poland: 3,620

2. Greece: 3,590

3. Hungary: 3,280

4. Japan: 3,240

5. South Korea: 3,010

6. Switzerland: 2,910

7. Iceland: 2,860

8. Netherlands: 2,820

9. Yugoslavia: 2,800