Caught red-handed

I spotted this tweet by a chap called Nason Maasi yesterday. He works with Mark Petticrew and Martin McKee at the LSHTM and his view of business is informed by their conspiratorial, Marxist way of thinking.

The title of this piece is: "It's time for the government to stop withholding the truth from smokers". Let us all pause for a moment and consider that it's PMI tweeting about this. Wow. https://t.co/KdDKFbHLQS

— Nason Maani (@spidermaani) November 26, 2018

PMI is Philip Morris International, the tobacco company. And yes, it would be an astonishing thing for them to say if it was 1972.

But it is 2018 and regular readers know that the people who are most likely to economical with the truth are unaccountable, stop-at-nothing, ends-justify-the-means zealots in 'public health'.

To illustrate my point, meet Lindsay Robertson. She is a tobacco control activist-academic from New Zealand who recently made the following claim about PMI's heated tobacco product IQOS...

Visited the IQOS store in Seoul today. It was conveyed as a high-end fashion item. Tobacco unmentioned. No age restrictions. I told sales-person I was a non-smoker. She was still happy to sell to me, despite the two signs claiming IQOS is only for smokers. pic.twitter.com/AUPlksvbNW

— Lindsay Robertson (@dr_lindsaybells) November 25, 2018

And now meet Moira Gilchrist, vice-president of PMI, who notes that the video evidence does not support Robertson's claim...

Here are the practices we apply in stores. CCTV footage shows staff followed them when interacting with you. They refused to sell to you. We take our responsibility in marketing & sales of our products seriously. Happy to discuss ways that we can further improve @InsidePMI pic.twitter.com/Xd2mnmwRWi

— Dr. Moira Gilchrist (@MoiraGilchrist1) November 26, 2018

As Nason Maani would say, wow.