Examination of witness (Questions 220
- 239)
THURSDAY 25 NOVEMBER
1999
MR CLIVE
BATES
220. You have suggested that the technology
for doing it, certainly as far as nitrosamines are concerned,
is simple and is available?
(Mr Bates) Very simple. When they first did it I understand
they just bought a lot of microwave ovens cheap and now they have
gone to a slightly more elaborate version of the same thing. Yes,
it involves microwaving the tobacco at a certain point in the
curing process and that kills off some bacteria which are the
precursors to the nitrosamines. It is not rocket science.
221. You think our scientific knowledge is sufficiently
secure to know they are removing them and that is a safety measure?
(Mr Bates) Yes.
222. Do you think the same knowledge is available
as far as other carcinogenic materials are concerned?
(Mr Bates) Other carcinogens and toxins, yes. There
is much more knowledge. In fact, I may have to send this to the
Committee, a symposium of tobacco scientists in Canada held earlier
this year. If you look at the abstracts of the papers they show
a fantastically sophisticated understanding of smoke chemistry,
in particular carcinogens and so on. We, as the health community,
and regulators are still going on about tar. Now tar is a very
crude collective noun for what is a very sophisticated mixture
of chemicals, some of which are susceptible to removal by certain
technologies. It is understandable why the companies do not wish
to go down that route and why we think, therefore, that regulators
should push them down that route. Carbon monoxide, for instance,
implicated in heart disease, poisonous gas, roughly 10 milligrams
from every cigarette could virtually be removed by using certain
kinds of filters or catalysts and there are patents for that.
It is the same argument for nitrosamines. The technologies are
there, why are they not being used? We have to get under this
umbrella term of tar and start to look at what can happen with
specific culprits, toxins and carcinogens.
223. Thank you. That is very clear. Can I just
throw in another thing. The tobacco companies do claim that there
is no proof of any link between environmental tobacco smoke and
any long term illness. What is your view of passive smoking and
its dangers?
(Mr Bates) It is a complete heart sinker. I know they
say that. If you look at the ground that the tobacco companies
most robustly fight on, it is addiction and passive smoking. The
reason for that is to do with their public affairs stance which
is that smoking is a matter of free choice and free will. That
argument holds true as long as the smoker can choose not to smoke
and, therefore, you cannot go round accepting that nicotine and
tobacco is addictive or else the free choice argument fails as
far as the smoker is concerned. It fails also if other people
are harmed as a consequence. It is a long established principle
of John Stuart Mill on liberty and so on that you are free to
undertake an activity as long as it does not harm others. They
have dug in a remarkably powerful public relations defence around
ETS. We uncovered documents from Philip Morris showing the scale
of their public relations offensive on ETS which included having
special advisors placed on Committees of this House, having people
inside The Lancet, setting up learned societies, learned
journals and so on, big advertising expenditure comparing passive
smoking to eating biscuits which got very severely condemned by
the Advertising Standards Authority. The trouble is the only people
that agree with the tobacco industry on this is the tobacco industry
themselves and people paid by the tobacco industry. If you look
at the reputable science community, if you look at the published
papers in the British Medical Journal, the research done
by the World Health Organisation, the big evidence reviews by
the US Environmental Protection Agency, the California Environmental
Protection Agency, the Government's own scientific committee on
tobacco and health, absolutely crystal clear, passive smoking
at home and at work is a cause of lung cancer and heart disease
among non smokers. The relative risks are around 1.25, so 25 per
cent increased risk of suffering those diseases and probably several
hundred people dying each year, non smokers, as a result of lung
cancer caused by passive smoking, probably several thousand as
a result of heart disease caused by passive smoking. The evidence
is very robust and it is denied by the tobacco companies for public
relations reasons.
224. You suggested a good deal earlier on that
you were opposed to a ban on smoking, and I understand that. If,
for instance, you take particular environmental circumstances,
are you happy that we are choosing an effective mechanism to use
voluntary agreements to reduce the amount of smoking which takes
place where people eat or do you think we should be tougher on
that?
(Mr Bates) A lot of people think that it would be
good to have a legislation on smoking in pubs and restaurants,
I am not so sure. If we did have legislation I think it would
be a little bit like going to war with the pub and restaurant
industry. Their focus would shift on to finding every possible
reason why having smoking inside a pub or a restaurant was a necessity.
They would be commissioning research, probably aided and abetted
by the tobacco companies, showing that thousands of jobs would
be lost. There would be the usual kind of public relations offensive
that you must be very used to as Members of Parliament, all to
demonstrate that legislation would be ineffective, would not work
and would cost the economy a fortune. The idea of going for the
voluntary approach, the Public Places Charter, is a bit like exhausting
all diplomatic options before declaring war. The orientation that
we have had from the pub industry is that they are on side, they
do not want legislation. They are on side for making something
happen. I spent yesterday with publicans in Staffordshire talking
about no smoking areas and the business success that pilot no
smoking areas have actually had. If we can build up the confidence
in the pub and licensed trade and restaurant industry that these
things are good for business and offer choice to smokers and non
smokers then I think we can make more progress quicker. I think
the Government and we have to retain a sort of steel fist in velvet
glove posture on this because the threat of legislation has to
be there if through voluntary measures they do not really deliver
what they are promising. I know I said earlier that voluntary
agreements with the tobacco industry had been an utter failure
but in this case the voluntary agreements are with the restaurant
and pub businesses who have a good commercial interest in going
down this route and I am confident it will be successful. I would
like to at least see this approach fail before legislation is
considered. If it fails then we will know there is bad faith and
we know there is no alternative. I am hoping it will succeed.
The signs are quite good from the trade associations in the pub
and restaurant business.
225. Because so many people choose to eat in
no smoking areas.
(Mr Bates) Exactly. Much as happened with cinemas,
it is moving that way without heavy handed legislative Government
intervention.
Mr Austin
226. No such problem here.
(Mr Bates) This is the problem area, this House.
Mr Gunnell
227. The Americans have taken that further,
have they not, they have been more prescriptive in some places.
(Mr Bates) They have, yes. They have been on this
for many, many more years. They have taken that approach, we are
trying a different approach here. I am confident that as ASH—and
I think this is the Government's view—we are not trying
to exclude smokers from public life, we are trying to ensure that
as a non smoker you do not have to breath other people's cigarette
smoke if you are at work or if you want to go out and enjoy a
social life in Britain.
228. How is it that American restaurant owners
have accepted that much more easily?
(Mr Bates) There has been a lot of resistance to it
in the United States. These things have been hard fought over
but once introduced they have been quite successful and proved
popular and they have not generally been reversed. You could look
over to France and see a very different story and we are trying
perhaps to plot a middle course through those two approaches.
Chairman
229. A third way.
(Mr Bates) A third way, that was the word I was looking
for.
Dr Stoate
230. Earlier to Mr Amess you said that you as
an organisation do not pay any parliamentarians to advise you.
(Mr Bates) Yes.
231. A minute ago you just said that the only
people who agree with the tobacco companies are themselves and
the people they pay. Do you know if there is anybody in this place
that they pay or the other place, down the corridor?
(Mr Bates) I would obviously consult the Register
of Members Interests and it would all be disclosed in there, would
it not.
Chairman
232. Would it?
(Mr Bates) No, I do not think it would. I do not know
who the tobacco industry retains as parliamentary consultants.
I know in the past they were associated with Ian Greer and so
on but what is happening now, I am afraid I do not know. I would
not want to cast around any accusations or assertions without
researching it properly. It is possible to disguise the route
by which money flows through consultancies and directorships and
all the rest of it.
Dr Stoate
233. I am surprised as an organisation you have
not done that.
(Mr Bates) We are busy on other things.
Mr Austin
234. Leaving aside the question of voluntary
agreements with restaurants, it is not possible to vote in this
place in a smoke free environment either.
(Mr Bates) I think if there was a primary legislation
on smoking issues going through Parliament at the moment or in
the next session then we would be focused much more on that sort
of thing but there is not at the moment. The Advertising Directive
has gone through the European routes and certainly we looked closely
at what the European parliamentarians were up to. Much of the
Government's policy in its White Paper is not legislation, it
is all about what happens in the NHS and how it spends its own
anti-tobacco promotion in Government. I think that has meant that
we have not had the usual urgency for looking at who is paying
who in Parliament and perhaps for the same reasons, because there
is not a legislative agenda going through this Parliament, it
would be less likely that there would be lots of money changing
hands to push a particular angle. Yes, maybe it is something I
should look more closely at.
235. Can I go on to the whole issue of addiction
again. I made a critical comment at the last session that people
tend to use the word habit and addiction interchangeably which
I did not think was helpful.
(Mr Bates) That is right.
236. I noticed a comment in Martyn Day's written
evidence, a quote from the Head of Corporate Affairs at Gallaher's
who said smoking was a habit which people would take up or give
up, it was not an addiction.
(Mr Bates) Yes.
237. You have given evidence and we have had
medical evidence that nicotine is a very powerful addictive substance.
(Mr Bates) Yes.
238. Do you think that most smokers are aware
that they are addicted?
(Mr Bates) I think so, yes. I think certainly over
time smokers come to recognise that they are not as in control
of their consumption of tobacco as they would perhaps wish to
be—that may not apply to younger smokers—but whether
they conceptualise that as addiction, which is a fairly potent
word, "addict" people associate with perhaps heroin
and cocaine use—
239. It is a powerful if not a more powerful
addictive drug.
(Mr Bates) If you look at the various ways of classifying
dependence, I think you will hear much more about this from the
Royal College of Physicians who have done an excellent piece of
work on this which will be published in the New Year. Certainly
it ranks alongside heroin and cocaine in terms of its propensity
to form dependence among its users. You see from the tobacco companies,
well lots of people are able to give up smoking or it does not
intoxicate the user, those are somewhat destructing arguments
to say the least. People do manage to give up heroin, in fact
quit rates for heroin are higher than quit rates for tobacco but
we would not describe heroin as anything other than very powerfully
addicted and dependence forming. Habit forming is not the right
word for it, it is much more serious than that. What the companies
have done, as I said earlier, for public relations reasons and
maybe for legal reasons—I have included a quote from the
US Tobacco Institute in my evidence—it is very hard for
them to acknowledge the true addictive nature of nicotine or tobacco
delivered nicotine because it destroys the free choice argument
and certainly it would make US courts much more hostile towards
the companies and much more sympathetic towards smokers. Companies
would find it hard to argue that these people had chosen to take
these risks voluntarily if they were addicted. I think because
the evidence on addiction is now so overwhelming the later version
of the public relations strategy on this has been to try to fudge
the term into meaninglessness. The statement published by BAT
in The Observer in March last year was a classic of that
genre in which "Addicted to Love, Addicted to the Internet,
Addicted to Shopping, Chocoholics" and all the rest were
used to suggest that this was an addiction which ranked alongside
those sorts of things. The medical view is that it is an addiction
which ranks alongside heroin and cocaine. So precision in terminology
is very important here. Philip Morris, when they made their much
vaunted admissions of truth about tobacco, were very careful to
qualify their acceptance that smoking and nicotine was addictive
by saying "In the way that those words are popularly used
in society" which was a way of fudging what was meant there.
There needs to be some precision in what is meant by addiction.
We will get that from the Royal College of Physicians' report.
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