Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Philip Morris lawsuit

It seems that Philip Morris is taking Norway to court, due to the country's display ban of tobacco (an English article here). PMI claims that the ban has no health effect, and suing to lift the ban.

Since it's a well know fact that reduced smoking does have an health effect, we can safely equal PMI's claim with of "no health effect" to "no reduced sale". Which brings up the following question:

- If there are no reduced sale, why would PMI sue?

Seeing how PMI is taking Norway to court, I assume their sale is affected and thus the ban actaully work as planned. Tobacco companies does have a grim history of "research" on health effect, and this lawsuit and the "research" behind it proves to me that very little has changed.

2 comments:

Wilhelm said...

Not really disagreeing, but seeing as how the sale of tobacco is still legal and the gov't taxes teh everloving crap out of the product based on it being bad fo' yo' health.....how come soda is cheaper than milk? When is the gov't gonna cover Mickey Dee stores with aluminum siding based on their products being severely detrimental to your health?

Anders said...

Agree. It is a concern that it's more expensive to buy health then unhealth and so forth. And the fast food industry has a lot to answer for as well.

But my only point with this post, was that it today can't be any doubt that smoking is bad for your health. And when PMI (indirectly) claims otherwise, it is just a pretty good indication that they have not learned from the past.