Cigarettes are the most lethal consumer product on the planet. Yet the burning desire for tobacco is as strong as ever. And it’s not just smokers. It’s government exchequers too, with tobacco revenue bringing in almost twice the cost to the NHS of treating smoking-related diseases.*
In Burning Desire: The Seduction Of Smoking, award-winning journalist Peter Taylor investigates how, despite all the health warnings and decades of increasing government regulations, thousands of young people around the world are seduced by smoking every day. He examines how powerful cigarette companies manipulate smokers, and is given rare access to the world’s second-biggest tobacco company.
Every year, more than five million customers of the tobacco industry die – in the UK alone, 100,000 people die from the world’s biggest cause of preventable death.
Peter travels to Australia to look at the industry’s last-ditch battle to prevent plain packaging in which glossy images are replaced with gruesome health warnings. And now, other countries are poised to follow suit, including England and Wales, after fierce lobbying and two controversial U-turns.
For an industry under constant attack, the tobacco industry is in remarkable health. With eye-watering profits of more than £30 billion, producing six trillion cigarettes a year, the industry would appear to be winning.
Peter Taylor has spent 40 years investigating how, in the past, the industry has dissembled and lied – which makes it all the more remarkable he was given rare access to the second-largest tobacco company in the world, British American Tobacco. He talks to their executives and learns how BAT, now openly recognising that smoking kills, has set itself a new core strategy of 'harm reduction', developing a range of less harmful alternatives to conventional cigarettes.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/pro...burning-desire
Interesting programme watched it last night on BBC iPlayer. Glad I'm an ex smoker.
Quote Reply
Originally Posted by Terpe
s ... *BUT ('scuse pun
& Non-smoking areas in pubs, clubs and the like (as there really 
that chucking lit fag ends out of car windows at 
