Tobacco exceptionalism?

Is tobacco a unique product or not? Let's ask comedy professor Anna Gilmore.

Anna Gilmore, 2007:

'The International Monetary Fund encourages privatization of state-owned industries, including tobacco industries, to help address macroeconomic problems and promote economic growth; however, it fails to consider the unique nature of an industry whose product kills.'

 

Anna Gilmore, 2019:

'Tobacco is a unique product in that it kills half of its consumers. It is the only consumer product that is subject of a global treaty, the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), with over 180 Parties including all but one OECD member. The FCTC is now embedded in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, enshrining the tenet that good governance in public health involves treating tobacco companies differently from the rest of industry.'

 

Seems like a clear 'yes'. And yet at a neo-temperance meeting recently, she was humming a different tune:

 

“For NCDs we should be able to move forward, we need to get beyond tobacco exceptionalism,” said Professor Anna Gilmore, Professor of Public Health and Director of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath

 

This is our old friend the slippery slope again, isn't it? Not surprising from someone who turned the UK Centre for Tobacco Studies into the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies. It surely can't be long before it becomes the UK Centre for Tobacco, Alcohol, Gambling and Ultra-Processed Food Studies.

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