The 1990s saw tobacco companies lobby to influence EU law to improve corporate interests' influence against the health lobby, say researchers at the Universities of Bath and Edinburgh.
The report's findings are based on papers that British American Tobacco had to release as a result of health litgation. They are claimed to show that the tobacco company used its influence to ensure that European policy initiatives were put through an impact assessment that favoured corporate interests over public health. Allied with Shell, British Petroleum, SmithKline Beecham and Johnson & Johnson and others they pushed the corporate cause.
According to the Guardian report (link below), BAT was advised to keep a low profile in this endeavour.
"Our analysis reveals that BAT saw RA [risk assessment] as a means of precluding the introduction of public smoking restrictions, which it saw as a growing threat in Europe," says the paper.
"The UK consultancy firm Charles Barker appears to have then been asked to outline the advantages for BAT of embedding RA within UK and European policymaking processes and advised that BAT would need to tread carefully, lobbying through a 'front' organisation and enlisting 'big industry names in support'."
The result:
Disguised behind respectable consultancies and thinktanks, the companies succeeded in getting a form of impact assessment made mandatory for every EU policy which – critics say – emphasised the financial costs to business and underestimated the impact on public health.
Since this move (according to the Guardian report) was a reaction to pending public smoking restrictions there is some irony that SmithKline Beecham and Johnson & Johnson (backed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) were included in this alliance. Pharmaceutical opposition to tobacco company interests in the market place has been well documented (here, here, here).
The study was funded by UK organisations including Cancer Research UK and Smokefree Partnership, both of which have lobbied for restrictions on public smoking. That the researchers found it a newsworthy story that corporations organised themselves to lobby a multi-national governing body such as the EU speaks for itself. It is to be expected that corporations will seek to defend themselves against governments that seek to increase their burdens and costs. Simply put, the EU wished to place the burden of proof on corporations regarding the safety of their products, rather than on the regulators to prove health hazards. The corporation succeeded in pushing for the use of Impact Assessments instead, and these allegedly underestimated the health impacts of hazardous products, as outlined above.
Regardless of the merits of the precautionary principle or of Impact Assessments ... different sectors in society will lobby for different interests, and this is the very reason that we have governments. For a health-lobby-funded study to stand in amazement that an industry lobby has lobbied the EU on its own behalf reflects only that the health lobby expects everything to bow down before it. We developed governments to deal with conflicts of interest, to hear different sides and to resolve the issues. The tobacco lobby discovered that it was persona non grata and allegedly attempted to conceal its involvement in the lobbying behind other companies. Naughty ... but was it the only reprehensible lobbying to take place within the EU?
Perhaps tobacco is seen as the only pointless industry in the EU. BAT may have far less reason for embarrassment than the likes of Shell in terms of actual pollution, trauma and lost lives. I suspect that there are far larger pollution issues at stake than tobacco, and if the emphasis is on the tobacco industry, then the emphasis is wrong.
The health lobby has made a big mistake focussing on tobacco, considering the amount of toxic development that takes place and especially in countries with limited protection. The pharmaceutical industry has become far too powerful, and although it is identified with the health lobby it is also a recognised corporate menace in health terms. A strong health lobby, without the pharmaceutical industry around its neck, would be a public asset. But putting so much energy into campaigning against lifestyle factors, it only has itself to blame if corporate industry runs rings round it.
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