Export Promotion

This John Pekkanen article in Washingtonian is really good. Fortunately, it was also given a really good subtitle, so I can just quote it rather than thinking up my own summary: "After years of health warnings, fewer Americans are smoking. But while Washington is encouraging Americans to quit, it has been helping big tobacco push cigarette smoking in other countries, using trade pacts to force poorer nations to accept American cigarettes and helping cause an epidemic of health-related problems." Read the whole thing.

Comments

Maybe few remember Philip Morris' crucial interventions in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.

In the summer of 1990, the Soviet Union's terminal economic crisis descended upon the product that many Russians considered their most irreplaceable: cigarettes. Faced with mass shortages of Soviet-made brands, angry smokers in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and other Soviet cities staged the protests that became known as the tobacco rebellion. A desperate President Mikhail Gorbachev fired the minister in charge of the industry and pleaded with the West for help.

To the rescue rode Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds.

In return for cash and barter goods, the American tobacco giants agreed to deliver 34 billion cigarettes -- the single biggest export order in their history. The crisis abated, and Gorbachev and the old order helped buy themselves an extra year in power. And the companies achieved an important foothold in a vast market that for decades had kept them tightly restricted or had shut them out altogether.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/tobacco/stories/global3.htm

Posted by El Cid | December 18, 2007 1:38 PM

The United States: the world's largest drug exporter.

One of the researchers in the article claimed it was bad for the economy of these countries because it killed off the workforce like AIDS. But that's not true. One good thing you can say about smoking is that it usually waits until you're older before killing you off.

Posted by mpowell | December 18, 2007 1:50 PM

"There's a lot to like in a Marlboro,
Out-of-sight, offshored;
Pack or Box!"

Posted by Jemand von Niemand | December 18, 2007 2:27 PM