Philip Morris International (PMI) is marking World No Tobacco Day on Friday (31 May) by publishing a call to leave behind ideological differences and accept smoke-free products.
The company says that the global regulatory and public health community should leverage technology, science and innovation to “more rapidly improve public health” in an initiative called ‘It’s Time to Unsmoke’.
While it says the best choice remains quitting, PMI recognises that many people who smoke won’t. It noted World Health Organization (WHO) forecasts that suggest there will be more than 1 billion people who smoke in 2025, about the same number as today.
These people deserve access to less harmful smoke-free alternatives, PMI said, and it is therefore campaigning for World No Tobacco Day to “evolve” into World No Smoking Day.
“In the late 1990s, some of our company’s fiercest critics challenged us to produce less harmful smoke-free products. We listened—and accepted the challenge,” said PMI Chief Operating Officer Jacek Olczak. “It’s taken hundreds of scientists, thousands of tests and billions of dollars to invent products without cigarette smoke: smoke-free products that don’t burn tobacco, products that adult smokers can switch to completely and not return to cigarettes.”
PMI also noted that smoke-free products contain nicotine and are not risk free. “However, the science shows they are a better choice than continuing to smoke. PMI shares its science and data openly with the scientific and medical communities, as well as with governments throughout the world,” the company said.
“Adults who smoke deserve access to smoke-free alternatives backed by solid science. They also deserve current information in order to make their own choices,” said Olczak. “By encouraging the men and women who don’t quit to completely adopt smoke-free alternatives, we can eventually leave cigarettes behind. That’s the smoke-free future.”
PMI has been developing smoke-free options since 1998, and the company unveiled the “next generation” of its IQOS range towards the end of 2018, with IQOS a big seller in duty free stores.
PMI posted a near doubling of sales of heated tobacco units for 2018, with shipments rising 14.2% to 41.4 billion last year. In January 2019 PMI took out full-page advertising in several national newspapers headed ‘A tobacco company that actually cares about health. How did that happen?’ It featured a question and answer interview with PMI CEO André Calantzopoulos, who noted, “After decades of evidence about the damage that smoking does, there is an ongoing societal responsibility towards smokers to illustrate solutions for quitting – and, for those who don’t quit, to provide less harmful alternatives”.
Footnotes: Click here for a recent interview by Martin Moodie with PMI Vice President of Duty Free Edvinas Katilius.
