Tobacco Scam: Smokefree Restaurants: Target Restaurants

Why does Big Tobacco trick hospitality into fighting clean indoor air?

1. Other business sectors have been quicker to see that secondhand smoke harms workers — and costs owners money.

2. Smokefree restaurants deeply undermine smoking's social acceptability — basic to tobacco marketing.

3. Bars attract Big Tobacco's young adult demographic target — and link smoking with social status.

4. Unpopular Big Tobacco needs another industry as a political front — so it highjacks "legitimate" hospitality groups and sets up fake ones.

Big Tobacco names secondhand smoke #1 threat...

Big Tobacco has faced public concern over secondhand smoke for thirty years. By 1978, a secret opinion poll commissioned by the Tobacco Institute, the industry's then-political arm, had already concluded:

What the smoker does to himself may be his business, but what the smoker does to the non-smoker is quite a different matter...This we see as the most dangerous development to the viability of the tobacco industry that has yet occurred.

— Roper poll

Alarm over secondhand smoke's dangers and support for smokefree measures has grown steadily stronger over the past twenty years. Secret industry documents show Big Tobacco fears the fallout from secondhand smoke more than anything else:

It is apparent that the effects of [secondhand smoke] on others is now the most powerful antismoking weapon being employed against the industry.

— Philip Morris

Attacks smokefree measures to guard its profits...

Public demand for smokefree measures cuts Big Tobacco's sales. In public, they trumpet support for "individual rights." In private, it's all about the bottom line:

If our consumers have fewer opportunities to enjoy our products, they will use them less frequently and the result will be an adverse impact on our bottom line.
— Philip Morris

In the 1980s, the Tobacco Institute actually calculated how much smokefree workplaces cost the tobacco companies:

Those who say they work under restrictions smoked about one-and-one-quarter fewer cigarettes each day than those who don't. That one-and-one-quarter per day cigarette reduction then, means nearly 7 billion fewer cigarettes smoked each year because of workplace smoking restrictions. That's 350 million packs of cigarettes. At a dollar a pack, even the lightest of workplace smoking restrictions is costing this industry 233 million dollars a year in revenue.

— Tobacco Institute

Today, smokefree workplaces are costing Big Tobacco ten times as much as they estimated in the 1980s — around $2.4 billion a year. With so much money at stake, Big Tobacco uses any means necessary to block more smokefree measures.

Preempts local smokefree measures state by state...

Politically, Big Tobacco is more powerful in state legislatures – where it greases deals with campaign cash – than in community councils closer to voters. So, state by state, Big Tobacco aims to preempt locals' ability to enact smokefree restaurant and bar measures. Its proven strategy?

First, claiming that smokefree measures hurt the hospitality industry, Big Tobacco stampedes restaurant and bar owners into claiming they need a "level playing field" statewide. Then Big Tobacco's highly-paid lobbyists hide from public view in the dust cloud they've stirred up. Are your community's ordinances at risk? Get help at www.protectlocalcontrol.org

Promotes hospitality programs for political aims...

Publicly, Philip Morris bills its "Accommodation Program" as a partnership taking "reasonable" steps to serve non-smokers and smokers. Privately, it lists political goals:

1. Pass and preserve accommodation/uniformity (i.e., preemption) legislation in all 50 states;
2. Defeat all severely restrictive legislation/regulation; and
3. Overturn existing legislation that severely restricts smoking.

— Philip Morris