The words that came to me as I read this piece in today’s Financial Times were disingenuous, self-serving, cynical, and the like.

Philip Morris International has pledged up to $1bn over the next 12 years to an arm’s-length foundation that will fund scientific research designed to eliminate the use of smoked tobacco around the globe.

[Philp Morris]…last week registered the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World as a US charitable organisation, with the stated aim of making grants on ‘how to best achieve a smoke-free world and advance the field of tobacco harm reduction’.

How generous of them! That’s what we need – scientific research (of course they wouldn’t do unscientific research, would they) to eliminate the use of smoked tobacco! And what a noble cause: to ‘advance the field of tobacco harm reduction’!

Then we have the two-faced André Calantzopoulos, chief executive of Philip Morris International, telling the Financial Times (emphasis added of weasel words and clichés):

Our efforts are squarely focused on ultimately replacing cigarettes with smoke-free products, by offering the millions of men and women who continue to smoke a better alternative. We are standing at the cusp of a true revolution and look forward to the foundation’s objective review of our efforts and efforts of others.

If we re-write this in plain English, what I think he really means is:

For the millions of people who are addicted to the nicotine in our cigarettes and who therefore find they are unable to quit, we offer an alternative, iQOS, which may (or may not) be a safer way of inhaling tobacco fumes. If everyone were eventually to switch from cigarettes to iQOS our profits would be sustained or may even increase and into the bargain we can present ourselves as a public health champion! (The $1bn is, of course, a drop in the ocean for us.)

Well, I can tell them exactly what they need to do to achieve a smoke-free world and advance the field of tobacco harm reduction – and I won’t charge anything like $1bn for my services. In fact I’ll advise them for free. This is what they need to do, and should do in a much shorter time span than the next twelve years: stop making cigarettes. That will achieve, as least as far as Philip Morris is concerned, the first aim of eliminating the use of smoked tobacco. As for the second aim, that of advancing the field, as they put it, my suggestion will go a long way to achieving that too.

But, of course, what they really want to do, while they keeping merrily on making and selling ordinary cancer sticks, is to plug for all they’re worth their new product with the unpronounceable name of iQOS. For those of my readers who are unfamiliar with what this is, here is a picture of an advertising placard for it, conveniently placed at a child’s eye level in my local branch of Seven-Eleven in Tokyo.

iQOS (or should that be iQOSs?) look like little cigarettes. They are made of tobacco which is heated (not burnt), with the resultant poisonous fumes being inhaled into the lungs. Philip Morris claims this is potentially less harmful than inhaling cigarette smoke – so that’s all right then. And, Bingo! – the field of tobacco harm reduction is advanced!

The misleadingly named Foundation for a Smoke-free World is curiously described as ‘arm’s length’, by which I suppose mean independent. But will it be?

Our old friend Professor Linda Bauld (https://www.nicotinemonkey.com/stigmatization-of-pregnant-smokers/), however misguided her views on the use of e-cigarettes in pregnancy may be, at least strikes a note of scepticism about this set-up:

I’m very cautious…I’d prefer research completely independent from industry.

Quite right.

Why do I say the Foundation is misleadingly named? Because what they envisage is a world where, even if smoking disappears, millions of people will still continue in the thrall of nicotine addiction.

Text and photo of iQOS placard © Gabriel Symonds

The illustration at the top is of a 15th-century misericord at Windsor Castle.