Page 2 of 2 Smoke gets in your eyes in
Indonesia By Duncan Graham
scenes showing cigarettes or people
smoking - but this has only caused ad agencies to
be more creative.
One popular ad promotes
a cigarette brand that allegedly tastes like
cappuccino by portraying a stack of coffee cups in
the shape of a cigarette. Most link sexual
prowess, outdoor adventure and male bonding to the
ingestion of nicotine. "Real men smoke (brand
name)" has proved to be one of the more successful
slogans.
Meanwhile,
recently introduced restrictions on smoking in
public places are widely ignored, with offenders
logically arguing that trucks, cars and
government-run buses belching black smoke should
be targeted first. Compulsory health warnings on
cigarette packs and ads are minuscule and wordy -
unlike the gruesome portraits of the bodily harm
smoking can cause that are now mandatory on packs
sold in nearby Thailand.
Although sales to
minors in Indonesia are prohibited, the law is
infrequently policed. The sight of schoolboys
brazenly inhaling in the street is a common sight.
There's even an open trade in tax-free smokes,
often hand-made from tobacco smuggled out of
factories, and on display at roadside eateries
across East Java. These sell for about Rp3,000 (30
cents) for a packet of 12 - less than half the
price of legal brands. For the poor, cigarettes
can be bought one at a time - a practice
politician Hakim and his backers also want to ban.
According to the latest research funded by
the WHO and the American Cancer Society, almost
70% of Indonesian men smoke. The good news is that
only 3% of women light up, largely because the
culture links smoking to prostitution. (Night
streetwalkers can often be sighted in the shadows
by the glow of their smokes.) That hasn't stopped
the industry targeting women, even to the extent
of spuriously linking smoking to orgasms, when in
fact it can damage reproductive organs.
In
1969, the average cigarette consumption per
Indonesian smoker was 469 sticks a year. That
figure has now almost tripled, according to recent
studies. And the death rate from smoking-related
diseases is reportedly close to 50%, with cancer
and heart attacks as the main killers.
Not
surprisingly, Indonesia's tobacco companies don't
like being portrayed as purveyors of poisons and
killers of citizens. So they have tried to boost
their image through socially responsible
campaigns, including a recent drive to clean up
the environment. For instance, Sampurna, the
country's second-largest cigarette manufacturer,
now owned by US tobacco giant Philip Morris, pays
for signs urging people not to litter. Another
ploy is to fund educational institutions and
scholarships. These are illegal in many countries
when the company uses its own name or the name of
a product.
Sampurna has also started to
seduce journalists with media awards equal in most
cases to six months' salary for the average
reporter. It has already ensnared the
environmental lobby with a green brand name and
grants to conservationists.
One
particularly hypocritical advertisement shows a
tobacco company sponsoring an anti-narcotics
campaign - while many health authorities say
nicotine is a gateway drug to harder stuff.
Daube said tactics used in the past by the
tobacco lobby included recruiting financial
journalists to run stories claiming controls would
trigger a widespread business collapse, and
"flat-Earth doctors" denying medical evidence of
the health dangers. He said the arguments now
circulating in political circles that controls
would cause tobacco farmers to go bankrupt are
patently false, noting that in Australia growers
shifted to other, often more profitable, crops.
"Smoking kills about half the known users.
It's responsible for about 10% of global deaths,"
said Daube. "The industry will claim it has a
right to advertise because there's no scientific
proof that advertising encourages people to start
smoking and that the product is legal. Newspapers
and magazines will protest that they'll lose
revenue. Sports administrators will say games will
suffer. We've heard all these claims before and
seen them refuted."
In Australia, Thailand
and other countries in the region, the involvement
of medical and public-health professionals in
anti-smoking campaigns has been critical to
raising public awareness about the habit's dangers
and in effecting declining smoking rates. In
Indonesia, up to 30% of doctors are smokers, and
some in the industry argue that there's no better
promotion for cigarette consumption than an
addicted doctor.
Duncan Graham
is an Indonesia-based journalist.
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