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Opinion: Time to tackle football’s gambling predators
Writing in the Times, columnist Dominic Lawson, discusses how the persistence of gambling marketing in football causes significant harm, primarily to young men. Lawson points to estimates from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities that state the excess cost to the government from gambling as well as the “societal value of health impacts” add up to somewhere between £1 billion and £1.9 billion. One of these health impacts is those committing suicide because of their gambling addiction, of which there are an estimated 450 a year in Britain.
Lawson writes of the 2005 gambling act, which the Conservatives promised to review in a white paper which has been repeatedly delayed, primarily due to political upheaval in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
Lawson reports that he has been told the white paper will be published on the 17th of April, but that it does not appear it will include anything on mandating the blocking of gambling endorsements on football shirts or the tightening of the regulations on broadcast and online advertising.
Lawson writes that there is some positive news; the white paper will set out a mandatory levy of 1 per cent on industry revenues, which is to be invested in research into “problem gambling and dealing with the fallout.” Although Lawson is sceptical that this will result in legislation before the next election.
Source: The Times, 26 March 2023
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USA: Altria makes fresh bet on vaping as it tries to move beyond Juul loss
Altria’s plan to come back from its disastrous $12.8bn investment in Juul is drawing it into a head to head fight for the US smokeless tobacco market with Philip Morris International, the former sister company it tried to recombine with four years ago.
The owner of the Marlboro brand in the US unveiled a new line-up of alternatives to the cigarettes which still account for 90 per cent of its sales at an investor day on Thursday, setting a goal of doubling revenues from smoke-free products to $5bn by 2028.
That portfolio, including On! oral nicotine pouches and a new device called Swic that heats tobacco capsules, will compete with PMI products Zyn, which was developed by recently acquired Swedish Match, and IQOS, the heated tobacco sticks which are expected to launch in the US in 2024. Smoke-free products delivered 32.1 per cent of PMI’s revenues last year.
Earlier this month Altria paid $2.75bn to buy NJOY, an e-cigarette start-up, in its latest bet on the vaping market after losing almost all of the $12.8bn it invested in Juul five years earlier. The US group wrote down the value of its 35 per cent stake in Juul to just $250mn before swapping it for intellectual property rights to some of Juul’s heated tobacco prototypes.
Source: The Financial Times, 26 March 2023
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USA: Gladys Kessler, federal judge in landmark tobacco lawsuit, dies at 85
Gladys Kessler, a federal judge who issued a landmark ruling against the tobacco industry in 2006 — finding that cigarette makers had violated civil racketeering laws by conspiring for decades to deceive the public about the deadly threat posed by smoking — died March 16 at a hospital in Washington. She was 85.
Kessler rose to greatest prominence as the judge who presided over United States of America v. Philip Morris USA et al., a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department in 1999 against leading U.S. cigarette makers.
The federal case — which followed a $206 billion settlement between the tobacco industry and 46 states — was one of the largest civil lawsuits in American history, with dozens of witnesses, tens of thousands of exhibits, months of testimony and litigation so lengthy that it outlasted Judge Kessler’s tenure on the bench.
Her 2006 decision — befitting the sprawling nature of the case — ran 1,652 pages. She detailed the ways in which tobacco companies had deliberately misled the public about the addictive nature of cigarettes and the health consequences of smoking.
“In short,” she wrote, they “have marketed and sold their lethal product with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success, and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted.”
Because of an earlier ruling by an appeals court, Judge Kessler, who was the sole fact-finder in the case, was unable to order the surrender — in legal parlance, the “disgorgement” — of billions of dollars in profits earned by the tobacco companies through what she had found to be their deceptive business practices.
She did, however, order the companies to undertake, at a cost of millions of dollars, a campaign of “corrective statements” in the national media on the health consequences of smoking. She ordered that cigarette makers stop marketing products as “low tar” or “light” or “mild” — terms historically used for products that, as she wrote, “offer no clear health benefit over regular cigarettes.”
Although Judge Kessler’s decision did not impose significant financial penalties on the tobacco companies, it established what antismoking advocates regard as incontrovertible documentation of the industry’s years of deception and fraud.
Her decision “is the most authoritative, comprehensive analysis of how the tobacco industry behaved anywhere,” Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which participated in the litigation, said in an interview. “It is the [single] most important legal decision on tobacco ever issued.”
The tobacco case is set to conclude later this year, nearly a quarter-century after it began, when, by court order, cigarette companies will begin displaying in retail stores signs about the dangers of cigarette smoking. One of them reads: “Smoking kills, on average, 1,200 Americans. Every day.”
Source: The Washington Post, 22 March 2023
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Australia: Tobacco-linked organisations and executives fail to declare interests to TGA vaping inquiry
Organisations and executives with known links to big tobacco and vaping companies have failed to declare them in submissions to a major government consultation on vaping reforms aimed at protecting children from nicotine addiction.
Guardian Australia understands the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) will be retrospectively asking those who submitted responses via email to declare any conflicts of interest. A TGA spokesperson said: “The TGA is aware of examples where the conflict of interest declarations made by submitters do not appear to be correct. We are considering what action can be taken in relation to those submitters.”
On Thursday afternoon (23/03), the TGA advised the government that of the almost 4,000 submissions to its vaping reform consultation, an “overwhelming” number of health experts and authorities support tightening border controls, with many wanting an import ban on non-nicotine vaping products as well.
Source: The Guardian, 24 March 2023
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