Tobacco industry lobbyists adopt new aggressive tactics

Forest, the pro-smoking group supported by the tobacco industry, is launching a new consumer rights campaign called Action on Consumer Choice (ACC) to encourage the alcohol and fast food industry to work with it to champion the rights of their consumers.

Forest’s director, Simon Clark, argued that drinkers of alcohol and fans of fast food would be the next targets of health campaigners if smokers’ freedoms were not respected and that some of the same tactics used against the tobacco industry were already being used against food and drink products that were deemed unhealthy.

Action on Consumer Choice, which has the slogan “Eat. Drink. Smoke. Vape. It’s your choice!” is being launched officially on 4 November 2014 at an event in London to celebrate Forest’s 35th anniversary. The campaign has been modelled on the Center for Consumer Freedom, a powerful US organisation funded by tobacco firms and fast food chains and set up by Richard Berman, one of the most successful lobbyists in Washington, DC.

Berman earned the nickname “Dr Evil” for lobbying against “nanny” authorities seeking to limit or regulate people’s lives. His activities have included arguing against an initiative to lower the blood alcohol content limit for US drivers, claiming that stricter limits would punish those who drank responsibly, and fighting against “food cops” who wanted to tell people what to eat because they claimed to know what was best for them.

Writing in his blog,1 Clark said that he could not think of a better model for the campaign than Berman’s Center for Consumer Freedom, which has the slogan, “Promoting individual responsibility and defending the freedom to choose.”

“Defending the interests of those who choose to smoke remains our number one priority, but it’s time to broaden our horizons and embrace other products,” Clark said.

Explaining the rationale for the campaign,2 Clark said, “Few would deny there are health risks associated with smoking. However, to suggest that smoking automatically leads to an early grave is absurd. It’s just one reason why the health police appear increasingly foolish on this and other issues.

“Nevertheless, the same exaggerated tactics that have been used to tackle smoking are now being used to target our eating habits. Incredibly, we are told that one fifth of Britain’s population will be clinically obese within the next 10 to 15 years and by 2040 half the population will be ‘superfat’ and in danger of dying early.

“The problem with these outlandish claims is that they are being used as an excuse for restricting freedom of choice through social engineering and censorship.”

Although people should be told about the risks to health of smoking, eating fatty foods, or drinking too much alcohol, they had the right to choose to ignore the risks, as long as they didn’t harm other people, he said.

Proposals to regulate more strictly the food industry included persuading or making manufacturers reduce the salt, saturated fat, and sugar content of food; imposing stricter advertising controls; removing by law all artificial trans fats from food and drink products; and introducing taxes on certain products. “I’m not against some degree of regulation, and I think most of us would agree consumers should be educated about the health risks of tobacco, alcohol and certain types of food,” Clark wrote. “But these proposals go far beyond protecting the consumer.”

Deborah Arnott, chief executive of the charity Action on Smoking and Health, said, “It would be crazy for food or drinks companies to jump into bed with the tobacco industry. It would wreck their reputations and completely undermine any arguments they want to make against future regulation. We expect this latest tobacco industry lobbying effort to fail miserably.”