Why Challenge Big Tobacco

The numbers are startling:

-  Tobacco kills one person every six seconds.
-  It kills up to half the people who use it, an average of 15 years
    prematurely.
-  It causes one in ten deaths among adults worldwide.
-  It kills more than five million people a year.                                      
                                       -  If current trends continue, tobacco will become the world’s
                                           leading cause of death by 2030, with 80 percent of deaths
                                           occurring in the world’s poorest countries.

The global tobacco epidemic is being driven by tobacco transnationals Philip Morris International, British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco. These corporations have built empires that sacrifice the health and well-being of hundreds of millions of people.
 

One of the key ways Big Tobacco hooks new customers is through advertising, promotion and sponsorship. Many of their tactics appeal to kids—in the U.S. and other wealthy countries, virtually all new tobacco users start in their teens.
 

Philip Morris International (PMI), British American Tobacco (BAT) and Japan Tobacco (JT) use their political influence to weaken, delay and defeat tobacco control legislation around the world.
 
 

In May 1998, U.S. tobacco corporations were forced to turn over millions of internal documents dating roughly from the 1950s to the 1990s.

The industry documents, posted on the internet, provide hard evidence of what the tobacco corporations knew, when they knew about the dangers of their products and the addictiveness of nicotine, and how they targeted young people with advertising and promotion.

These documents also show how threatened the corporate giants felt at facing a well-organized grassroots campaign and boycott.