Tobacco industry

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The tobacco industry includes companies that manufacture cigarettes , cigars , smoking tobacco, snuff , chewing tobacco , snus or bidis , among other things . This branch of the economy is strongly dominated by global corporations or companies with a state monopoly .

In 1999 about two million people were employed in the cigarette industry and its suppliers worldwide. Over two-thirds of all jobs were in China , India and Indonesia . The three largest multinational tobacco companies had just over 100,000 employees in 2003. In 2013, a good 10,000 people were employed in the cigarette industry in Germany; the turnover of the branch amounted to 20.1 billion euros, of which 12.2 billion euros was attributable to the tobacco tax .

Companies

Tobacco companies

Within a few years, four private tobacco companies remained from the numerous tobacco manufacturers in the world. They produce 52.2% of all cigarettes. The largest cigarette maker, however, remains the state-owned Chinese tobacco company China National Tobacco Corporation with a market share of 32%.

Companies Head office Group sales
(2012) 		Group sales
(2005) 		Market share
(2007) 		Number of items
(2003)
China National Tobacco (CNTC)
(China only) 		China People's RepublicPeople's Republic of China People's Republic of China $ 169.9 billion k. A. 32.0% k. A.
Altria
( PM International , PM USA and PM Polska SA) 		United StatesUnited States United States $ 101.3 billion $ 63 billion 18.7% 736 billion
Japan Tobacco
(including Gallaher Group ) 		JapanJapan Japan $ 25.7 billion $ 40 billion 10.8% 423 billion
British American Tobacco (BAT)
(2005 data including Reynolds American ) 		United KingdomUnited Kingdom United Kingdom $ 25.5 billion $ 17 billion 17.1% 792 billion
Imperial Tobacco
(including Reemtsma and Altadis ) 		United KingdomUnited Kingdom United Kingdom $ 11.0 billion $ 37 billion 5.6% 201 billion
Reynolds American United StatesUnited States United States $ 8.3 billion k. A. k. A. k. A.
ITC Limited IndiaIndia India $ 4.4 billion k. A. k. A. k. A.
Further k. A. 15.8% k. A.

Other regional tobacco companies:

Supplier company (selection)

Judicial process

Since the 1950s, liability and criminal proceedings have been brought against the tobacco industry in almost 40 states , most of them in the United States. This flood of processes continues. In 2012, for example, there are over 400 cases pending against Philip Morris in the USA, while Philip Morris International has to bring just over 150 cases as defendants to trial in all other states.

Judicial proceedings by authorities

Master Settlement Agreement (1998)

US states brought numerous damages lawsuits against the tobacco industry in the 1990s . In 1998, 40 US states, the District of Columbia and five US territories reached a Master Settlement Agreement with the US tobacco industry . In the main, the US tobacco industry pledged to pay plaintiffs more than $ 200 billion over 25 years. She also agreed to no longer direct her advertising to young people. The states waived the filing of further lawsuits.

US government versus US tobacco industry, 1999-2010

The Department of Justice (DOJ) of the US government filed in 1999 against the US tobacco industry (u. A. Philip Morris USA , RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company , Brown & Williamson Tobacco ) a civil action on USDistrict Court Washington DC ( District Court ) a. It was based on a law (the so-called Rico Act or Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act ) of 1970, which was passed at the time to combat the Mafia. The tobacco industry documents were supposed to prove that the indicted companies had formed some kind of criminal cartel since the early 1950s to deceive their customers. All profits and interest, a total of 280 billion US dollars, the tobacco industry had made since the 1950s, the US government demanded back.

The trial opened on September 21, 2004. The admissibility of the profit skimming was denied on February 4, 2005 by the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Colombia ( Federal Court of Appeals ) in an interlocutory judgment on the grounds that the Rico Act could not be applied retrospectively. On July 18, 2005 , the plaintiff appealed against this judgment to the Supreme Court of the United States . She was dismissed by the Supreme Court on October 17, 2005. A second appeal before the Supreme Court failed in 2010.

The single judge Gladys Kessler of the Federal District Court ruled on August 17, 2006 in her 1742 page verdict that smoking cigarettes caused illness and death. Despite the company's internal recognition of this fact, the tobacco industry has systematically denied the harmful side effects of cigarettes in public for decades, portrayed them in a distorted way and played them down. Therefore, it ordered a ban, according to which from January 1, 2007, misleading terms such as mild or light may no longer be used on packaging or in advertising in the USA . In a clarification order dated March 16, 2007, it extended this ban to the US export of such cigarettes. In addition, it obliged the sued companies to inform the public about the harmfulness of their products. She waived the imposition of fines because the Supreme Court already considered this in its judgment of October 17, 2005 to be inadmissible. The legal costs, however, were imposed on the defendants.

The defendant companies appealed against this court ruling to the competent federal appeals court. Because of the suspensive effect of the appeal, the restrictions imposed by the Federal District Court did not become legally binding. The court ordered an exchange of letters for the parties, which ended in May 2008.

The current status of the process is documented on tobacco-on-trial (English) and by Philip Morris USA (English).

Agreements EC with Philip Morris (2004) and Japan Tobacco (2007)

The European Community and 10 EC member states had brought various lawsuits against Philip Morris International (PMI) over cigarette smuggling . On the other hand, PMI initiated proceedings against the European Commission before the European Court of Justice. All existing legal disputes were ended on July 9, 2004 with the conclusion of a multi-year agreement on an effective system to combat cigarette smuggling and counterfeiting . The agreement provides for payments from PMI. The amount depends on various factors and could exceed $ 1 billion over a period of 12 years.

On October 5, 2006, the ten Member States and the European Commission (on behalf of the European Community) agreed on the exact distribution of these payments. By then, PMI had already paid $ 325 million.

A similar agreement (Engl. " Cooperation Agreement ") joined the European Commission and 26 EU member states (excluding the UK) on 14 December 2007 with Japan Tobacco International (JTI) and Japan Tobacco Holding BV (JTH) from. However, it is not a settlement agreement as there was no pending legal dispute with the EU. It was agreed that the JT would pay the Commission and Member States a total of US $ 400 million over 15 years that could be used to combat the illicit trade in cigarettes. In addition, JT has undertaken to pay the taxes and customs duties itself if more than 50,000 real, smuggled cigarettes from its production are seized.

Judicial proceedings in Europe by private individuals

Only in the last few years have smokers or their relatives brought claims for damages to European courts:

  • The first lawsuit by a smoker in Germany against Reemtsma for damages and compensation for pain and suffering due to damage to health was dismissed in 2003 by the Arnsberg Regional Court. The Hamm Court dismissed the appeal of the plaintiff in 2004 also decreases.
  • Ente Tabacchi Italiani (ETI, now BAT Italia) was sentenced in March 2005 by the civil chamber of the Roman Court of Appeal to pay damages. The court sentenced the cigarette manufacturer to pay 200,000 euros to the relatives of a smoker who died in 1991. They complained because ETI had not provided sufficient information about the risks of smoking before the warnings were introduced on cigarette packs .
  • In May 2005, the Roman Labor Court awarded the relatives of a deceased passive smoker 400,000 euros. She had worked for the Ministry of Education in the same office as three heavy smokers for 7 years. Her requests to move her to a smoke-free job have been turned down several times. The court recognized that secondhand smoke , like smoking, can cause cancer and therefore upheld the lawsuit.
  • In the McTear v Imperial Tobacco damages lawsuit , the widow of a smoker who died of lung cancer in 1993 and who started smoking in 1964 sought £ 500,000 in damages. She alleged that the cigarette manufacturer had illegally failed to draw attention to the health dangers of smoking. The highest civil court of Scotland, the "Court of Session" in Edinburgh , dismissed the action on May 31, 2005 in a 1121-page judgment. One of the main arguments of the court was that any person capable of judgment could freely decide what to do with sufficient information. Therefore, they must also take full legal responsibility for their actions themselves.

Lobbying

The tobacco industry is considered to be the industry that has been able to consciously cast doubts about the health hazards of its products and thus prevent health protection measures and compensation payments. For nearly half a century, the tobacco industry hired scientists to gradually deny the risk of lung cancer in smokers, then deny the increased risk of heart disease and other health hazards, and finally deny the health hazards of passive smoking. Through this systematic denial of scientific evidence , the tobacco industry managed to delay government regulation and compensation measures for decades , despite an existing scientific consensus on the health dangers of smoking and millions of smoking-related deaths.

Little was known about the lobbying of the tobacco industry until the 1990s. There was speculation about unknown influences on people from politics, business and the media , but there was a lack of witnesses or documents that could prove this. That didn't change until 1994 when Stanton Glantz of the University of California came into possession of 10,000 internal documents from tobacco companies Brown & Williamson and BAT. In 1998, the US tobacco industry was also forced to continue releasing documents in the course of a liability process. The US public was outraged to learn of unpublished research on the dangers of smoking, secondhand smoke and nicotine dependence.

So far, the tobacco industry has had to make over 40 million pages of documents publicly available. They are so extensive that it has not yet been possible to evaluate all of them. Nevertheless, it can be shown that the most important goals of the tobacco industry were to influence tax legislation, to prevent advertising and sponsorship bans for tobacco products and to trivialize the health risk from passive smoking.

The approach of the tobacco industry was similar in all countries: politicians, scientists and journalists were rewarded for allowing themselves to be instrumentalized for the concerns of the tobacco industry through contracts, consultancy contracts , invitations to conferences and sponsorship of events.

Lobbying the tobacco industry in German-speaking countries

The influence of the tobacco industry on Swiss and German politics in the 1980s and 1990s could be analyzed and proven on the basis of these documents.

The payment of scientists was disclosed in the so-called "Rylander Affair". In 2004, an investigative commission at the University of Geneva in Switzerland found that its retired scientist Ragnar Rylander could not be regarded as a researcher independent of the tobacco industry because, in his role as a consultant, he had permanent and largely secret connections with it. The Swiss Federal Supreme Court had already overturned a cantonal sentence against two scientists who were accused of defamation against Rylander .

The Foundation for Behavior and Environment ( VerUm ) was founded on December 21, 1992 by the Association of the Cigarette Industry (VdC) as a public foundation under civil law and is based in Munich . It is the successor organization of the "Research Council Smoking and Health", the scientific department of the VdC. It is considered a lobby organization.

Since 2014, the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture has maintained a publicly accessible list of all discussions that it has with the tobacco industry and its associations.

Tobacco industry in Germany

A tobacco advertising ban is planned in Germany for the year 2022, with promotion and sponsorship being excluded from it. The tobacco industry has been spending more money on "promotion" and "sponsorship" than, for example, on poster advertising, since at least 2017. The tobacco tax in Germany alone resulted in revenue of 14 billion for the state budget in 2019. Small but steady price increases in the 2000s ensured that despite lower cigarette sales in Germany, the income for the industry remained at the same level.

Consumer behavior in Germany

While the Institute for Therapy Research names the preventive campaign Be Smart, Don't Start as a factor for the high proportion (80%) of adolescents who have never smoked a cigar rat, the fact that the many adolescent never smokers are less relevant is the German Cancer Research Center's assessment the campaign, rather than the high prices brought about by the price increases in the 2000s. The proportion of adults smoking also fell (as of 2020). There is a high proportion of academics among adults who have given up smoking. In some professions (e.g. building cleaning, nursing or security guards), smoking continues to be frequent. Smoking behavior is one of the main reasons why people from low income groups die much earlier than high earners.

Credibility and honesty

In November 2005 the Reader's Digest Europe Health Survey 2005 was published. The credibility and honesty of 15 industries were asked in 13 countries. The tobacco companies ended up in 15th and last place with 6% of the respondents, who rated this industry as completely or fairly trustworthy and honest.

The ranking: pharmacies 65%, airlines 34%, car industry 29%, health insurances 26%, banks and financial institutions 26%, pharmaceutical industry 25%, supermarkets 25%, media / press 21%, holiday travel organizers 20%, food industry 18%, life insurance companies 18%, telephone companies 18%, oil companies 8%, alcohol industry 7%, tobacco companies 6%.

In a voluntary self-restraint agreement with the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG), the German tobacco industry has undertaken not to present any tobacco advertising in the vicinity of schools and youth facilities and not to set up any tobacco vending machines. All tobacco vending machines in violation of this agreement should be dismantled by the machine operators by the end of 1997.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Key figures of the cigarette industry . Website of the German Cigarette Association ; Retrieved September 18, 2014.
  2. ↑ Tobacco Atlas 2009, Tobacco Companies. ( Memento of June 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF)
  3. ↑ Documents on the Master Settlement Agreement ( Memento of the original dated January 8, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.naag.org
  4. ↑ library.ucsf.edu ( Memento of the original from December 25, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.library.ucsf.edu
  5. ↑ Tobacco On Trial blog page
  6. ↑ http://www.altria.com/media/03_06_03_04_05_DOJ.asp ( Memento from July 23, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ Documents on the 2004 Agreement. In: European Office for Combating Fraud. Retrieved May 6, 2009 .
  8. ↑ europa.eu
  9. ↑ COOPERATION AGREEMENT 14 December 2007 JT International SA JT International Holding BV and the European Community and the Participating Member States (PDF)
  10. ↑ In connection with the fight against international cigarette smuggling ( Memento from September 15, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ David Michaels , Celeste Monforton: Manufacturing Uncertainty: Contested Science and the Protection of the Public's Health and Environment . In: American Journal of Public Health . tape 95 , Supplement S1, 2005, p. 39-48 , doi : 10.2105 / AJPH.2004.043059 .
  12. ↑ repositories.cdlib.org
  13. ↑ prevention.ch
  14. ^ Investigation report in the case of Prof. Ragnar Rylander ( Memento from January 10, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
  15. ^ Judgment of the Federal Court of April 27, 2003 (French)
  16. ↑ Conversations with the tobacco industry . Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture - Tab. Only accessed December 18, 2017.
  17. ^ Diana Pieper: Health Risks: Coalition apparently wants to completely ban tobacco advertising . In: The time . November 10, 2019, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed March 8, 2020]).
  18. ↑ a b c d e f g Dietmar Jazbinsek: Protection of non-smokers: Germany is the last hope of the tobacco industry . In: The time . February 20, 2020, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed March 8, 2020]).
  19. ↑ Tax revenue from tobacco tax in Germany until 2018. Accessed on March 8, 2020 .
  20. ↑ Tobacco prevention in Germany - what really works? German Cancer Research Center, 2014/2018. dkfz.de
  21. ↑ Smoking rate among adults. Retrieved March 8, 2020 .
  22. ↑ DEBRA. Retrieved March 8, 2020 .
  23. ↑ Trends in substance use and substance-related disorders . In: Dtsch Arztebl Int . tape 116 , September 2, 2019, p. 585–591 , doi : 10.3238 / arztebl.2019.0585 ( aerzteblatt.de [accessed on March 8, 2020]).
  24. ↑ rdeuropehealth.com