Big Tobacco tries to stop SA’s anti-smoking Bill from becoming law

It seems South Africa’s long-awaited new anti-tobacco legislation is set to go nowhere slowly — again. 

On Wednesday, parliament’s newly appointed portfolio committee on health sat to discuss the Tobacco Bill for the first time since South Africa’s post-election government was formed in June.

The contentious Tobacco Products and Electronic Delivery System Control Bill has been in the making since 2018, when then health minister Aaron Motsoaledi asked people to comment on proposed laws that would ban vaping in public spaces and rule that tobacco products such as cigarettes and vapes must be sold in plain-looking packaging, as will be decided by the minister. 

But because of pushback the Bill got to parliament only in December 2022.

At Wednesday’s meeting, though, some committee members said that they’re worried about the “potential social and economic impacts” of the Bill, like causing people to lose their jobs, illegal sales and the government losing out on taxes. 

Lekan Ayo-Yusuf, public health expert from the University of Pretoria and a member of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) study group on tobacco regulation, says not only is there no evidence to back up such concerns from impact assessment studies but it could also be taken as calls for the whole public participation process to start from scratch. 

If this were to happen, “it could take years for the Bill to pass”, says Ayo-Yusuf — and something that would play right into the hands of the tobacco industry. 

Swopping smokes  

The reason for South Africa having to get stricter on tobacco use is the country has signed the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, an international contract in which signatories promise that they will put legislation in place to protect future generations from the health problems linked to smoking, such as cancer and lung and heart diseases.

In 2021, more than a quarter of South Africans older than 15 used tobacco — a worrying figure because, already back in 2016, 26 000 people died from smoking-related diseases in the country, costing the government more than R42 billion in healthcare expenses and lost productivity. 

But the profits are as addictive as the tobacco that generates them, which means that the tobacco industry needs to keep on recruiting a new generation of lifetime smokers to fill their pockets. 

Over the past decade, the use of e-cigarettes among teens and young adults exploded. In 2011, about 1.5% of youths in the United States vaped; by 2018 the number was close to 21%. 

Easy flavours, sleek designs and child-friendly packaging are all designed to make these products appeal to children, says a WHO report published in May. 

Moreover, says the report, the tobacco industry promotes their so-called next-generation goods (products that don’t need tobacco to be burnt to give you a kick) as “safer” than old-time cigarettes, even though they still contain nicotine — which makes them no less addictive than cigarettes and can be a gateway to smoking.

Because the Constitution says every South African must have a chance to weigh in on how laws are made, public hearings on the Bill started in August 2023. By February, people from seven of the nine provinces had had a chance to air their views. 

But the meetings then paused ahead of the elections — without people from KwaZulu-Natal and the Northern Cape having had their say. 

“I think we will proceed as we have in the past,” said the committee’s chair, Sibongiseni Dhlomo, on Wednesday, referring to picking up on public hearings where they left off in February.

With Big Tobacco having a long history of trying to interfere with tobacco control policies, the industry watchdog Stopping Tobacco Industries and Products has set out a list to help government and citizens see through their tricks.

Here are three tactics Big Tobacco uses to stall the Bill’s approval. 

Twisting the science

The tobacco industry has been called out for manipulating science before. Even though research started linking smoking to cancer back in the 1950s, tobacco companies denied it. Philip Morris International (PMI), for instance, tried to cause doubt and dissuade the public from quitting in the 1960s, saying “we don’t accept the idea that there are harmful agents in tobacco”. 

And still they won’t quit. 

Punting their so-called next-generation products like vapes and nicotine pouches as safer than cigarettes, they’re using the idea of harm reduction — an evidence-based way to help reduce effects an addiction has on someone’s health — to simply hook new clients, experts say.

One way to do this is to fund other research organisations to spread their message.

In 2017, the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World (FSFW) was set up, a nonprofit and seemingly independent organisation that supported harm reduction research, despite being funded by PMI. 

In 2020, the foundation claimed that findings from a study among teens in the US which showed that fruity, chocolate or mint flavours rank third in the list of reasons for young people enjoying vaping, as evidence that flavours are not what gets people hooked. 

In an analysis of how Big Brand companies skew science to fit their goals, public health policy experts found that attacking research that paints these corporations in a bad light is a typical strategy. For example, a 2020 article in the tobacco-funded Filter magazine called health concerns about e-cigarettes “a fear-driven crusade” of “lies and junk science”. 

Statements like these can influence the public and policymakers’ decisions, when given airtime by seemingly impartial groups, such as the organisation that owns the magazine and who says their “mission is to advocate through journalism for rational and compassionate approaches to drug use, drug policy and human rights”. 

People who participated in the public hearings said that since vapes and cigarettes are different, they shouldn’t be regulated in the same way, and on Wednesday, some of the members of the portfolio committee asked for “comprehensive data” to compare the health problems that could come from vaping with those linked to traditional smoking. 

Skewing public opinion surveys 

In 2019, Japan Tobacco International (JTI) published a report based on “a nationally representative survey” that asked people how they felt about plain packaging of tobacco products. 

Although JTI said that the research was conducted independently, critics from the Research Unit on the Economics of Excisable Products (Reep) at the University of Cape Town said the study was flawed. For starters, the fact that JTI funded the survey made it biased by definition, they said, and with getting views from only 1 014 people it could not be considered representative of the country’s more than 32 million adults at the time. On top of that Reep called them out for using leading questions, which, simply in the way they were phrased, could show an opinion that would fit their narrative. 

Apart from the questionable research method, the report also looked strikingly similar to one JTI had funded on public opinion about plain packaging in the United Kingdom.  

Plain packaging is a touchy subject. With advertising rules having gotten tighter over the years, for example, tobacco advertising not being allowed in films, on TV or in magazines in many countries, Big Tobacco has had to rely on packaging as a marketing tool.

Pictures, colours or even certain words used on cigarette packaging can make the products look attractive or falsely reassure consumers about possible dangers, research says. For example, brands targeted at young people are marketed as less harsh and include descriptions of appealing flavours like “mint” or “strawberry”.

Instead, research shows that plain packaging will create negative expectations about the taste of cigarettes and will cut down on its cool factor.

Causing confusion about illicit trade

One of the main arguments against the new Tobacco Bill is that it could cost South Africa billions in tax revenue. That’s because plain packaging and bans on till displays in shops will encourage smugglers to sell counterfeit products, big names in the tobacco industry say. 

When cigarettes are produced illegally with fake trademarks or sold to customers before taxes are paid on the goods, it is seen as illicit trade.

But research shows that tobacco companies have been exaggerating the size of the illicit market for many years for their own gain. 

Last year, for example, British American Tobacco South Africa (Batsa) claimed that they had to lay off 200 people because of how much the illicit market had grown during the 2020 tobacco ban, which they said made up 70% of the country’s tobacco business. 

The 70% estimate comes from a survey that the tobacco giant paid the market research firm Ipsos to do — except the Ipsos paper doesn’t come to this conclusion. That figure refers only to the proportion of shops that sold illegal cigarettes in one province, while for the country overall, the number of stores that sold illicit cigarettes actually dropped from 47% in 2021 to 34% in 2022. The real share of the tobacco market owned by illicit trade, is likely to be closer to 54%.

There’s probably more to Big Tobacco’s concern than meets the eye, experts told Bhekisisa previously. What looks like a company trying to be a good corporate citizen, they said, is more likely to be a new approach to an old goal: to protect its bottom line. 

This story was produced by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism. Sign up for the newsletter.