Action on Smoking and Health
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ASH Testifies at Geneva Hearings on FCTC [10/16-1]

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) testified as hearings on the WHO's proposed Framework Convention on Tobacco Control held in Geneva, Switzerland. The testimony is controversial. Here is a copy of the testimony.

Testimony of Professor John F. Banzhaf III, Executive Director and Chief Counsel, Action on Smoking and Health

I am Professor John Banzhaf of the George Washington University Law School in Washington D.C. For more than 30 years, I have also served as Executive Director and Chief Counsel of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), our nation's oldest, largest, and possibly most successful US antismoking organization. That means that I have been fighting the war against smoking on a full-time professional basis — and winning — for more years than most of the people in this room, and than most of those who appear before this panel.

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) very strongly supports the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and will do everything in its power to see that it comes into effect and is effective. Smoking is a worldwide problem which knows no boundaries, and it cannot be fought effectively except on an international basis, and with the active cooperation of the many nations where big tobaccco is trying to promote its deadly product.

For this reason ASH has submitted testimony in support of the Convention [COPY ATTACHED], and is in the process of hiring additional staff and adding relevant materials about it to our award-winning Internet web site — http://ash.org . Today, I would like to stress two additional points.

The first is to urge you to emphasize and plan on using legal action — which has proven to be so effective in the US, and is now proving its worth in other countries — as a major weapon in the war on smoking. The second is not to let the tobacco companies co-opt and stymie this effort as they have repeatedly tried to do in the past, and occasionally have succeeded in doing.

Incorporate a Legal Action Component into Any Plans

ASH was founded when I used legal action to force radio and TV stations to provide hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free time for antismoking messages, and eventually drove cigarette commercials from our nation's airways. Since then ASH has used legal action to end commercials for little cigars; restrict and then ban smoking on airplanes and buses and in many public places; persuade health insurance companies to charge smokers higher rates; establish the legal rights of nonsmokers to sue for clean air; and more recently to help ban cigarette vending machines and get cigar health warnings.

Moreover, ASH has supported and cooperated with bringing law suits against the tobacco industry; a plan which has now changed the very landscape of the war on smoking in the United States with a multi-billion dollar settlement, major concessions from the tobacco industry, and many more law suits on the way. Indeed, it would be fair to say that most of the important news
— and victories — in the war on smoking over the past 5-10 years in the US have been legal ones; not new research, not new educational programs, and not even new legislation.

NGOs in other countries have also proven that legal action can be a very effective weapon in the war on smoking, and that even the filing of a legal action — much less the trial — can have an important educational effect as well as often leading to significant substantive changes. For these reasons I urge that legal action be supported as a prime weapon in the arsenal of
weapons against smoking, in addition to the traditional weapons of research, education, and legislation.

Don't Let Big Tobacco Co-opt The Framework Convention

For even more than the 30+ years that I have been actively fighting them, big tobacco has been claiming that it was reformed and seen the light, and then trying to join — and thus surreptitiously undercut — any efforts to control its spread of disease and addiction. Some times they have been defeated — most recently when they tried to get so-called cooperative legislation through the US Congress to give them virtual immunity from tort law suits.

Often times, however, big tobacco has succeeded — not only directly, but also through partners such as tobacco growers or tobacco unions, and through organizations deceptively formed for the very purposes of infiltration and deceiving the public and policy makers — in co-opting the very mechanisms which should be controlling them.

If you were debating a framework convention to control illicit drug smuggling, you certainly would not invite the distribution cartels or the opium growers or opium workers to testify at your hearings, much less to participate or even advise in the process. You should do no less here.

Otherwise, I fear that in 10 years we will all be reading subpoenaed documents about the tobacco industry's successful plans to infiltrate and stymie WHO's efforts to control the most deadly and addictive drug ever known to man.

Please don't let them get even one foot in the door!