Profits and Lies

Action on Consumer Choice (ACC) is closely modelled on the Centre for Consumer Freedom (CCF) in the USA,  a hugely powerful organisation funded by tobacco firms and fast food chains that was the brainchild of Richard Berman, one of Washington’s most successful lobbyists. . Tobacco companies are backing the new organisation that launches this week to push the message that drinkers and fast food fans will be the next targets of health campaigners if smokers’ freedoms are not protected.

Simon Clark of Freedom of the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (Forest), the tobacco-funded body behind the ACC, notes on his blog “I can’t think of a better model than Rick Berman’s Centre for Consumer Freedom.”

 Berman has argued against an initiative to lower the blood alcohol content limit for US drivers, claiming that stricter limits would punish those who drink responsibly.  Berman told leading oil and gas executives that they must be “prepared to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities”. He continued: “Think of this as an endless war. And you have to budget for it.”

 “Action on Consumer Choice appears to be the latest front group set up by the tobacco industry to confuse the public,” said Professor Anna Gilmore of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath.

Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), said she doubted whether the ACC would be able to attract anything other than tobacco companies. “It would be crazy for food or drinks companies to jump into bed with the tobacco industry. It would wreck their reputations and completely undermine any arguments they want to make against future regulation.”

The concept of a business whose profits depend on the sale of cancer-inducing drugs is repellent. The idea that capitalists are cynically engaging in a business for their own short-term gain at the expense of others’ health is an obscenity. It is a condemnation of capitalist society that the tobacco industry are not alone in that death is their trade, such as the armament industry. But two wrongs don’t make a right.