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Excerpts from Canadian west is world leader in fighting smoking

By Wendy Koch, USA TODAY [12/31/99]

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- At midnight tonight, Canada's westernmost province broadens its war on tobacco -- already perhaps the world's toughest -- by banning smoking in all indoor workplaces, even bars, casinos and nightclubs.

"We'll take ashtrays off the table, but we won't try to catch everyone," says Chris Dobson, a non-smoker who manages The Roxy Cabaret, a smoky live-music club in Vancouver.

The province, more than twice the size of California and nearly as trendy, may well represent the future.

As the 1900s witnessed a global boom in tobacco use, largely driven by U.S. exports, the next century is likely to see a spread in tobacco control, some of it made in the USA. "The 21st century will be the decline of this product," says Derek Yach, director of the World Health Organization's Tobacco Control Initiative. He predicts that 100 years from now, people will look at tobacco's current popularity and ask, "How could individual governments have allowed this to happen?"

Anti-smoking efforts are proliferating worldwide:

* A French court ruled in early December that Seita, maker of Gauloise and Gitane cigarettes, was partly responsible for the cancer death of a three-pack-a-day smoker. It was the first time a tobacco company was held liable for a death in France.

* Canada last week filed the world's first lawsuit against Canadian companies to recoup taxes lost because of alleged cigarette smuggling by the firms. It sued in a U.S. court.

* At least seven other countries have sued in U.S. courts: Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Thailand, Bolivia, Panama and Ukraine. They're suing U.S. companies to recoup the health-care costs of treating smoking-related illnesses. They cite the success of U.S. state attorneys general, who have settled similar claims for $ 246 billion to be paid over 25 years.

* WHO is drafting a treaty, to be ready for signing in 2003, that could call for higher tobacco taxes, strict advertising limits, warning labels and ingredient disclosure. In November, it began airing some of California's anti-smoking ads, in six languages, in its 191 member countries. One ad shows a Marlboro-Man figure on a horse, telling another cowboy that he has cancer.

* The World Bank has urged nations to raise tobacco taxes in a bid to curb usage and reduce health-care costs.

* The European Union is planning, by 2006, to ban almost all tobacco ads and sponsorship in its 15 countries.

British Columbia, which sees itself as the California of the north, is well-suited to take the lead. The province of 3.7 million boasts a healthy, active lifestyle, with plenty of juice bars, vegetarian eateries, kayaking and mountain climbing. It also has no tobacco growers; a health minister, Penny Priddy, who has made tobacco control a priority; and a feisty independent provincial agency, the Workers Compensation Board, to protect workers' health and safety. The board crafted the new smoking ban because it believes secondhand smoke harms workers. "We have a strong labor climate here," says Jeff Gaulin, spokesman for the Ministry of Health.

The province, a diverse culture of pot-smoking hippies and cowboys, was the first government in the world to require cigarette-makers to test and disclose their ingredients, which they began doing last year. Along with Newfoundland, it has the nation's highest tobacco taxes, and, along with Ontario, the lowest smoking rates: About 26% of its adults smoke, compared with 29% nationwide.

British Columbia has drawn on U.S. experience. It's modeling its new workplace smoking ban on California's similar law. It used Minnesota's trove of tobacco industry documents, obtained during that state's lawsuit against the industry, when it became the first Canadian province last year to sue cigarette makers. It cites Massachusetts for inspiring its own graphic anti-smoking ads.

American tobacco companies offset a 17% drop in domestic U.S. consumption from 1988 to 1998 by boosting cigarette exports 70 % during that time, U.S. figures show. In many of their overseas markets, smoking rates remain high: 55% for men in Japan and higher for those in China, Russia and South Korea. And tobacco ads remain prevalent. In the Philippines, they appear on calendars next to images of the Virgin Mary.

"We're prepared," says Elizabeth Cho, spokeswoman for Philip Morris International, the world's second-largest cigarette-maker. "We're used to dealing with regulations around the world." Cho says the company has competed well in countries such as France, Australia, and Finland that have stricter and longer-standing marketing restrictions than the United States. Besides, she says, many countries have smoking bans, but "you wouldn't know it." She cites France, which does little to enforce a 1991 law that bars smoking in many public places.

Still, despite industry savvy, advocates say the anti-tobacco movement will eventually succeed.