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Call
for Philip Morris
Richmond’s elite lauds the cigarette maker for putting
its R&D center downtown. But its newly spun-off
sister unit still aims to make butts the
old-fashioned way, endangering the lives of
millions around the world.
Tanya
was a middle-aged Russian woman with bobbed hair,
dark eyes and a throaty voice who worked for me
when I was Moscow Bureau chief for BusinessWeek.
As our office manager and lead translator, she
could whap out letters in Russian at warp speed on
her portable Bulgarian typewriter as she asked for
interviews. All the while, she’d puff away on
truly foul-smelling Russian cigarettes made up of
a heavy dark tobacco.
Her
chain-smoking was something to get used to. It
wafted through the small, converted two-room
apartment that served as our office. (We stacked
telex paper in the bathtub.) There were ashtrays
everywhere. We’d open the balcony door nine
stories up to let out the blue clouds – not an
easy task when it was minus 30 outside. Out on the
street everyone smoked. In restaurants everyone
smoked. Taxi drivers smoked. Twelve-year-olds
smoked.
Tanya
would be an ideal candidate for Philip Morris
International, whose sister company has made a big
name in Virginia over the years and employs more
than 6,500 people in Richmond. Altria, the holding
company that owns Philip Morris, is splitting
itself up with not-too-subtle corporate
legerdemain.
Facing
billions in lawsuits by former smokers and a
decline in U.S. smoking, Philip Morris USA, now
headquartered in Richmond, is positioning itself
as the “good” company that is de-emphasizing
cigarettes in favor of other, supposedly less
harmful, "smokeless” products. It has
gained lots of local good will by opening a $350
million biotechnology center downtown, but it is
hard to see what it's doing there that has to do
with health, as bio-technology usually does.
Company
PR flaks disingenuously claim they are
experimenting with snuff, which has been around
for centuries. Hmm. Some $350 million in research
for “snuff”? Put another way, they're working
on new ways to let patients ingest drugs, like
nicotine, orally instead of smoking it. Philip
Morris has a lot of experience strapping dogs and
monkeys to cigarette-smoking machines so maybe
there’s some “synergy.” Forget asking what
the company is doing, however. Company spokesmen
dance around the issue, explaining that the
“market” is very “competitive” as if
other, more forthcoming businesses don’t face
similar pressures.
The
“bad” company, Philip Morris International,
now based in Europe, doesn’t screw around with
such subterfuges. That company has one goal and
one goal only: It wants the Tanyas of the world to
smoke more. According to the Wall Street
Journal, more than half of the world’s
smokers live in 15 countries, including Russia,
China, India, Indonesia and Bangladesh. They are a
big, big market.
The
World Health Organization wants to combat the rise
in global smoking because about 5.4 million people
die prematurely from tobacco-relate cancer each
year, the Journal reports. By 2030, the
number of victims could rise to 8.3 million, and
most are in low to middle-income nations that are
ill-prepared to build more cancer wards.
Why
the European headquarters for Philip Morris
International? To get away from lawsuits and bad
press, obviously. Tobacco firms are being accused
of tail-dragging away from tougher markets in the
U.S. to places like Moscow and China because
regulation is lax to non-existent, and their legal
systems are too primitive to come up with punitive
measures such as the 1996 Master Agreement which
cost Philip Morris and other tobacco companies
billions of dollars.
Naturally,
Altria denies the corporate split up is a ruse to
sell in more regulatory-friendly markets. But then
its Richmond counterparts want you to believe that
they have built a $350 million R&D facility to
develop better snuff.
In
the past when I have criticized the tobacco
industry in the Capital of the Confederacy, I was
told that this is Ole Virginny and the South, and
they are built on tobacco, with the implication
being that an outsider whose last name ends in a
vowel might not understand it. Baloney. As a cub
reporter I used to cover the Eastern North
Carolina tobacco markets and I got a good look at
how the federal quota system made it much more
lucrative for farmers to grow a useless crop like
tobacco rather than beneficial ones like corn or
wheat. I know how quota holders used to rake in
tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars even
though they might live on Chicago’s Gold Coast
and not on a tobacco farm. And
I have been confronted by Farm Bureau lobbyists who were
frustrated that I didn’t buy their portrayal of
tobacco farmers as sympathetic country folk
straight out of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
But
we’re not really talking about tobacco farmers
rich or poor here. We’re talking about a huge,
powerful and well-oiled company and its related
parts. The power elite in Richmond and other parts
of the state genuflect before it. As for the
Tanyas of the world, to hell with them, we’re
talking profits and stock prices and, of course,
Virginia tradition.
--
February 11, 2008
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