Kathleen Sebelius, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services
Long before the digital revolution transformed our interaction with the world, human health established itself as the great global connector, aligning our interests, impacting our economies, compelling us to work together, and punishing us if we drift apart. Whether fast-emerging threats like the Zika virus or the long-running tobacco epidemic, our tiny planet faces massive health challenges that don’t stop with national boundaries. Fortunately, neither does our capacity to counter them.
Each year since 1988, the global community has come together on May 31, World No Tobacco Day, to call attention to the preventable death and disease caused by tobacco: it kills one person every six seconds, and if current trends continue, 250 million children and young people alive today will die from tobacco-related disease, with more than 80 percent of them in low- and middle-income countries around the world. Serving as Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama Administration, I put forward a “Tobacco Control Strategic Plan” to work towards a society free of tobacco-related death and disease. I’m proud of the progress the United States has made, but this global epidemic requires a global solution. That’s why I urge Congress to support President Obama’s new trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
The tobacco industry has a long history of abusive legal and marketing tactics to gain new market access and hook more consumers on its lethal products. So the World Health Organization is marking 2016’s World No Tobacco Day by calling on countries to “get ready for plain packaging” — the removal of tobacco company branding and clearly marking health risks on labels — and increase effectiveness of health warnings. The world’s governments must have the flexibility to craft new legislation and programs to address local challenges with effective public health measures, like implementing plain packaging rules, and this is exactly what TPP provides, explicitly protecting government authority to regulate for the public health, and shielding governments from the tobacco industry’s spurious legal challenges.
TPP exempts legal claims that challenge tobacco control measures through the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process. It provides broad coverage, protecting regulation on the wide-range of measures needed for tobacco prevention, including controls on the distribution, labeling, packaging, advertising, marketing, and sale of tobacco products.
Tobacco companies’ notorious and unique history of using all available options to challenge regulation includes ISDS lawsuits against developing countries that lack resources for a robust legal defense. While tobacco companies have not yet successfully used ISDS to upend tobacco control measures, they use their deep pockets to prolong the dispute settlement process and delay regulatory implementation. Under their “delay, delay, delay” strategy, the legal outcome is win-win: just a single day’s delay means thousands of new customers become addicted to their deadly products, but TPP limits the use of this dirty trick.
With TPP’s strong policy statement against tobacco companies’ abuse of ISDS, the American Cancer Society and Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids have called the trade deal a “historic step for public health” and “a critical step toward ending the tobacco industry’s growing abuse of trade agreements to challenge life-saving tobacco control measures all over the world.” The American Cancer Society and Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids are committed to ending tobacco dependence, and both are pushing for quick passage of TPP.
Global public health challenges call upon the deepest human impulse for compassion and motivate our greatest human capacities for innovation and invention, and I believe that with innovations like those included in TPP, we can make the next generation tobacco-free. After decades of research and policy development, we know what it takes to get there, but we must take action. President Obama delivered a trade deal that allows us to work together, rather than drift apart. And as we observe World No Tobacco Day, I urge Congress to work together to take the next step: ratify TPP and give the world a tool we need to fight for a future free of death and disease caused by tobacco.
