Exporting Death

By BRUCE VAN VOORST

A primary goal of the tobacco bill is to cut smoking by American teens. Nearly 3,000 youngsters start smoking each day, and tobacco-related disease will kill half of them. But what about the rest of the world? Those new smokers--60,000 a day--could be on their own. Tobacco-state Democratic Senators Ernest Hollings of South Carolina and Wendell Ford of Kentucky have moved to strike language that would constrain exports and cost jobs in farming and manufacturing here.

Only 7% of the world's smokers are American, so U.S. companies pour funds into the already huge overseas market. Chinese smokers, for instance, consumed 1.7 trillion cigarettes in 1997. Last year a third of Philip Morris' $72 billion in revenues came from selling cigarettes abroad--712 billion of them. "The West got the Russians out and the Marlboro Man in," sighs Witold Zatonski, a leader in Poland's anti-smoking crusade. In Warsaw's streets, signs for L&M tout the "American way." Joe Camel, banned in Boston, boogies in Buenos Aires; the Marlboro Man rides on in Taiwan. One target of overseas advertising: women, who represent only 5% of the world's smokers.

Some legislators are appalled at the idea of exporting tobacco. California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi says, "How can we possibly say smoking is deadly for our kids but O.K. for foreign children?" Hollings and Ford argue that America has no right to dictate to other countries. Why punish American suppliers, they reason, when most of the $262 billion in world tobacco revenues winds up in the coffers of state-owned monopolies?

No matter who sells the stuff, the consequences are the same. The World Health Organization projects that 500 million people now alive will be killed by tobacco by 2025.

--By Bruce van Voorst