The CEO of Philip Morris International (PMI), one of the world’s largest tobacco brands, now says that it will stop selling cigarettes in the UK within ten years, and that regulators should ban them altogether—despite a big, difficult problem. Smell the warning.

As Business Insider pointed out, PMI CEO Jacek Olczak told The Post on Sunday that the company plans to "leave smoking behind", adding that "up to ten years from now, you can completely solve the smoking problem. "Olczak and PMI Chairman André Calantzopoulos told the Daily Telegraph that PMI now supports a total ban on smoking as part of the British government's plan to eliminate smoking by 2030.

"We can see the world without cigarettes," Olzac told the Daily Telegraph. "Actually, the sooner it happens, the better for everyone." Calanzopoulos likened the problem to switching to alternative energy and electric vehicles, saying that smoking ban "may be a solution - but it's not enough. "

Calanzopoulos claimed to the Daily Telegraph that many smokers believe that cigarette alternatives are less dangerous than smoking, and the British government should educate smokers to “choose smoke-free alternatives” (for the record, it has been this way). Of course, it should be noted that after making countless cowboy killers, PMI is in a very advantageous position to profit in the "smoke-free" market with its terrifying products.

PMI is separate from Virginia-based tobacco company Philip Morris USA, which is a subsidiary of Altria, which produces Marlboro cigarettes and other famous brands in the United States, such as Virginia Slims. PMI parted ways with its American counterparts in 2008 to respond to investor pressure and thereby protect itself from lawsuits brought by American smokers. Since then, it has turned to claim that the future of tobacco is an alternative to cigarettes, such as its IQOS product, which heats a tobacco plug to release smoke without actually burning it.

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PMI brings the IQOS device to the market as if it were a safer alternative to smoking or e-cigarettes (although due to Food and Drug Administration regulations, only in a limited way in the United States). Although compared with cigarettes, IQOS devices may emit fewer toxic chemicals, but the Atlantic Monthly reported in 2019 that many health experts suspect that “heat not burn” products are actually safer than traditional smoking. This is especially true considering that the tobacco giant has struggled for decades to suppress the science linking smoking to cancer and other lung diseases. In 2017, Reuters reported on violations of PMI support research cited by the company when lobbying health authorities to approve IQOS. The report also details how PMI promotes the device mainly in countries that have seen long-term declines in smoking rates.

A 2018 review in the "Tobacco Control" magazine found that 20 of the 31 studies on heat-not-burn devices at the time were funded by tobacco companies, including PMI. Chris Bostic, deputy director of public policy at Action on Smoking and Health, told The Atlantic that these studies may be completely rejected, and PMI's claim that fighting for a smoke-free future is a "ridiculous public relations stunt." (At the time, in 2019, PMI did not promote smoking bans.)

Healthline reported in April 2021 that two recent studies published on Thorax found that there is evidence that heat-not-burn tobacco products may be almost as dangerous as cigarettes, causing endothelial dysfunction and vascular wall damage, and claimed that the product can help Quitting smoking may be exaggerated because users of these devices are less likely to quit smoking than traditional smokers. In another study published in the Journal of Harm Reduction in 2021, researchers found that interviews with 30 current and former IQOS users who had smoked or quit smoking in the past two years showed that they generally believed that the device was “more harmful than smoking Small, but not without risk". , Although there is a lot of uncertainty. "

According to the Guardian, anti-tobacco activists and scientists urged the public not to buy PMI marketing because it tried to gain access to the lung health-related departments of the pharmaceutical industry by making more than $1.38 billion (£1 billion). Make an offer to Vectura, a manufacturer of asthma inhalers, and acquire Fertin Pharma, a manufacturer of nicotine chewing gum, for US$820 million. In 2019, PMI even launched a life insurance company called Reviti, which will offer discounts to smokers who switch to alternative cigarettes such as IQOS.

Ian Walker, executive director of cancer research, told the Daily Telegraph that don’t trust PMI because PMI positions itself as “part of the solution to a smoke-free world while continuing to actively sell and promote deadly cigarettes globally.”

Walker added: "The industry has long been subverting tobacco control policies for its own economic interests in the UK and globally, so it is essential to protect public health from vested interests."

Updated: July 27, 2021, 2:30 PM Eastern Time: A previous version of this article referred to IQOS as a heat-not-burn device and an electronic cigarette. According to Joshua L. Karelitz, a postdoctoral scholar in the Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention Program at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, public health researchers use the term e-cigarette to refer to devices that electronically heat liquids to produce an aerosol for users to inhale. It does not contain actual tobacco. This is true for IQOS, and we have updated our report to reflect this difference.