Transcript of the video:
The issue is not that councils don’t understand that smoking cessation isn’t important. It’s just because that because of cuts to funding, they simply can’t support smoking cessation services anymore in competition with the other things they have to provide. But there’s a huge amount of money in smoking and the tobacco industry continues to make massive profits.
The obvious solution to this problem is to make the polluter pay, and to make sure a levy on the tobacco industry is raised, and that money can be used to actually support smokers to quit, and to help deal with some of the harms smoking has caused, and also very importantly to pay media campaigns which we know are effective and can help to encourage people to try to quit and work against the glamorisation of smoking that we see.
Transcript of the video:
One of the things the tobacco industry does is Corporate Social Responsibility. It tries to present itself as being a responsible organisation and responsible group of companies which are doing something good and giving something back — they “accept” that there’s some harm from smoking, but nevertheless, they have to balance that against their other activities. One of the ways they’ve tried to do this is by sponsoring things. In the past, a lot of sporting activities were sponsored by the tobacco industry. Formula One is an obvious example.
One of the places where tobacco sponsorship still exists is in the arts. Back in 2016, we launched a campaign called Smokefree Arts to deal with that. Japan Tobacco International (JTI) were sponsoring a series of exhibitions at the Royal Academy. They were a corporate partner at the Southbank Centre in London. This has two affects. The first is that it enables the industry to present itself as doing something “good”, both to the outside world and to the people that work for them. They can say: “Well, you know we are doing something good. We’re giving something back.” But it also is an opportunity through the events the sponsors get invited to, to use those facilities for corporate hospitality.
So we set up this campaign and a thousand healthcare workers wrote an open letter to these organisations telling them that this was unacceptable. It’s had some effect. Certainly the Southbank Centre terminated its relationship with JTI early and the Royal Academy hasn’t renewed the sponsorship arrangement with JTI, so it suggests that it is possible, by bringing these things to the light, to actually make a difference.
Learn more about Dr. Hopkinson’s work here.
