The Cancer of Capitalism

According to World Health Organisation, there are more than one billion smokers worldwide today, and 200 million of them are women. In half of the 151 countries where surveys have been done on tobacco use among young people, there are nearly as many girls as boys smoking cigarettes. An estimated eight million people could die from tobacco use by 2030, including 2.5 million women with three quarters of them from poor countries.

WHO chief Margaret Chan has criticised the attitude of the tobacco industry as "ruthless" and "insidious" in its pursuit of markets in developing countries. Advertisements telling smokers they are smarter, more energetic and better lovers than their non-smoking counterparts are a familiar sight across Bangladesh. One ad said that "if a lady smokes, her baby will be smaller and it will be easier to deliver, the labour will be less painful".

The World Health Organisation warns that tobacco companies are targeting women in developing countries as a new growth market. In Bangladesh 43 percent of the adult population - or 41 million people - use tobacco in some form, up from 37 percent in 2004.The country fits a pattern emerging across the region of rising rates of female tobacco use, particularly in Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Cambodia.It's a trend "...tobacco companies are encouraging ..., viewing women in developing countries as their largest unexploited market ", according to the WHO

"As the number of smokers has declined in the rich countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the tobacco industry has to look to new horizons to market their products... to look for greener pasture...The tobacco industry is like a mutant virus" said Douglas Bettcher, a World Health Organisation expert

A sane society would attempt to tackle the problem now, freed from the constraints of profit and the domination of vested interests. But as we live in a far from sane society it is patently not going to happen. A survey of British medical specialists found that they ranked nicotine higher in the addiction stakes than even heroin. Tobacco actually kills far more people in the world than hard drugs like heroin and cocaine put together. Yet the same newspapers that scream about Britain's sink council housing estates with their heroin junkies, carry on accepting double-page adverts from the tobacco multinationals. Capitalism is a system with no real regard for the health of the mass of the population.The capitalist market is an economy where people really do make money from legalised murder.