WHO Director: Big business bad for public health

Later today, the Washington State Liquor Control Board will release draft rules for a commercial marijuana marketplace in our state.  As we consider what such a for-profit system should look like, it behooves us to reflect on what has happened with other legal consumables, including food, soda, and alcohol, and their affect on public health. 

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Margaret Chan recently stated that noncommunicable diseases have overtaken infectious diseases as the leading cause of death worldwide.  She pointed to Big Business as one of the most serious challenges to overcoming these problems: “It is not just Big Tobacco anymore. Public health must also contend with Big Food, Big Soda, and Big Alcohol. All of these industries fear regulation, and protect themselves by using the same tactics.”  In particular, she declared Big Alcohol one of the most serious challenges to public health in an address to the 2013 Global Conference on Health Promotion. Chan noted corporate use of front groups, lobbyists, promises of self-regulation, lawsuits, and industry-funded research that “confuses the evidence and keeps the public in doubt," along with the use of gifts, grants, and contributions that falsely cast industry as respectable corporate citizens.   

Read more about how Big Alcohol can't police itself, and Big Alcohol's deceptive use of "drink responsibly" themes. 

Marijuana is "the dream tobacco companies have"

Over at The Reality-Based Community blog, they discuss the eagerness of big tobacco to gain a new market: marijuana.  Here's an excerpt:

I dug through the internal documents that the government forced big tobacco to release and found evidence of the industry’s longstanding interest in selling pot . . . 

This is the dream tobacco companies have had since at least the 1970s, when consultants issued a secret report to Brown & Williamson touting a future product line in marijuana. “The use of marijuana today by 13 million Americans is socially the equivalent of the use of alcohol by some 100 million Americans,” said the report, found among millions of documents turned over to plaintiffs during the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s. “It is the recreational drug; the choice of a significant minority of the population. The trend in liberalization of drug laws reflects the overall change in our value system. It also has important implications for the tobacco industry in terms of an alternative product line.”

The tobacco companies, the report concluded, “have the land to grow it, the machines to roll it and package it, the distribution to market it. In fact, some firms have registered trademarks, which are taken directly from marijuana street jargon. These trade names are used currently on little-known legal products, but could be switched if and when marijuana is legalized. Estimates indicate that the market in legalized marijuana might be as high as $10 billion annually.

The report was a long time ago, and no doubt the industry has more modern ideas for selling marijuana today. Maybe that’s why, during the run up to the 2010 election in which marijuana legalization was on the ballot in California, Altria took control of the web domain names AltriaMarijuana.com and AltriaCannabis.com. For those not in the know, Altria is the parent company of Phillip Morris, the manufacturer of Marlboro, Players, Benson & Hedges and many other popular brands of tobacco cigarettes.