Tobacco’s Reign in Spain May Fall in Court

An overweight, middle-aged man was casually puffing on a cigarette as he stood near the “Smoking Prohibited in This Center” signs plastered on the closed windows of the Ruiz de Alda Hospital here.

The head of the hospital’s smoking prevention unit, Ana Romero Ortiz, walked right by the smoker without saying a word to him. Instead, she complained to a visitor that “the managers don’t do anything to avoid this.”

She said she occasionally asks violators to stop--and sometimes they reply that they just saw a doctor or nurse breaking the same rules.

It’s still a tough life for anti-tobacco activists in Spain, where nonsmokers generally eschew the forceful assertion of rights often favored in the United States. But that may be changing, even here in the Andalusia region of southern Spain, where smoking was introduced to Europe shortly after Christopher Columbus arrived from America.

The Andalusia government recently announced plans to file a lawsuit next month against five major international tobacco firms, seeking reimbursement for the public health expenses incurred to treat smokers. Backers and local media say the lawsuit, modeled on successful litigation by state governments in the United States, will be the first of its kind not just in Spain but anywhere in Europe.

Tobacco growers in Andalusia, meanwhile, are more worried about planned cutbacks in European Union tobacco subsidies than about the pending lawsuit.

With critics of smoking becoming increasingly vocal about the contradiction inherent in governments fighting smoking while subsidizing tobacco farming, some tobacco growers fear that they will be targeted for particularly severe cuts in EU subsidies, which for some farmers make up the bulk of their income.

Francisco Vallejo, head of the Andalusia Health Department, said at a recent news conference that the main goals of the lawsuit will be to prove a legal responsibility of tobacco firms for health-care costs and to set a precedent that could be useful in other cases in Spain and throughout Europe. The five firms to be targeted are Philip Morris, Brown & Williamson, the Canary Islands’ Cita, the French-Spanish firm Altadis and Japan’s JT International, which together produce more than 90% of the cigarettes sold in Andalusia, Vallejo said.

“The important thing is to win the case,” he said. “If we get even a sentence that says these companies must pay for one X-ray, we will have won.”

The Madrid-based Tobacco Business Assn., which represents the tobacco companies, issued a statement saying the planned lawsuit has no legal basis. In the few smoking-related lawsuits previously brought against tobacco companies in Spain, judges have ruled against individual smokers or their families and in favor of the firms.

Vallejo said in an interview that the lawsuit is also aimed at raising public sensitivity to the health and monetary costs of smoking.

“In my opinion, Spain is the country with the least awareness in the European Union,” he said. “It’s a very serious problem, and there’s no awareness that it’s a serious problem. . . . That’s why the intervention of the government is necessary.”

The Andalusia Health Department says it spends $315 million a year, or 8.5% of its total health-care bill, to treat people with smoking-related illnesses. It estimates that 35% of the region’s residents over 16 are smokers--slightly more than the average for Spain and the European Union as a whole--and that 10,000 people die each year of tobacco-related diseases out of a regional population of 7.3 million.

Vallejo said an inevitable fight against tobacco is gathering strength throughout the European Union and predicted that “in very little time” tobacco fields will be converted to other crops because of cutbacks in subsidies. The cutbacks are necessitated by the planned expansion of the EU.

“Anti-tobacco policy should be tackled on all fronts, and [subsidy cutbacks] is one of those fronts,” Vallejo said. “Clearly we cannot make families who live off tobacco plantations hungry, but it doesn’t make sense that we are seriously fighting tobacco and at the same time we are giving them subsidies.”

There is a touch of irony in the cutting-edge role of the Andalusia government in launching a new legal front against tobacco firms. The first manufacturer in Europe of tobacco products was the royal tobacco factory in Seville, the capital of Andalusia.

The factory building still exists and is now part of the University of Seville, said Alvaro Garrido, director of the Madrid-based Smokers for Tolerance Club, an organization dedicated to promoting polite behavior by smokers and nonsmokers toward each other.

“Andalusia was the birthplace of tobacco in Europe, and now they are asking for that [lawsuit],” Garrido said.

Tobacco has a proud history in Spain. Garrido noted that Columbus and one of his sailors, Rodrigo de Jerez, are credited with bringing tobacco back from America and introducing it to Europeans.

De Jerez is famous for having attracted the attention of the Spanish Inquisition through his ability to exhale smoke from his mouth and nose, which was taken as a sign of evil. That brought him a three-year prison term toward the end of his life.

It wasn’t much later that the supposed health benefits of tobacco played a role in its spread throughout Europe from its initial stronghold in Spain.

Jesus Martin Sanchez, 60, a tobacco farmer with fields outside Granada, said 70% of the price he gets for tobacco leaves comes from the EU support. “I’m really worried about the subsidies,” he said. “If the European Union cuts the subsidies, we won’t be able to continue growing tobacco, because it won’t be profitable anymore.”

Martin dismissed the lawsuit as being “all politics” and unlikely to have any real impact.

Some Spanish smokers still don’t accept the idea that the habit hurts their health. Antonio Molina Plato, 60, a Granada construction worker who has smoked since he was 15, noted that some years ago olive oil was said to be bad for health, and now it’s considered very good.

“With tobacco, it’s going to be the same thing,” Molina said. “In two or three years, tobacco is going to be the best thing for you.”

He said the planned lawsuit simply reflects that “it’s fashionable to be against tobacco.”

Smoking “is part of the culture,” Molina said.