"`Consider these figures,' Koop ended. `Last year [1988] in the United
States, 2,000 people died from cocaine. In the same year, cigarettes
killed 390,000 people.'"

[From an article by Alexander Cockburn in The Nation:]

##################################################################

On September 19, 1989, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative
held hearings in Washington on the export of American-made cigarettes
to Thailand and their promotion. Pivotal to the hearings was a piece
of legislation, Section 301 of the revised 1974 Trade Act, that
permits the government, if persuaded that U.S. exporters are
experiencing "unfair" or "discriminatory" trade restrictions abroad,
to take punitive action against the offending nation. [..] The major
U.S. tobacco companies were petitioning to force Thailand, which for
twenty years has had a successful antismoking campaign and whose
Cabinet in 1987 approved a proposal for a total ban on cigarette
consumption, to admit American cigarettes under pain of serious
sanctions if they refuse.

Among the witnesses appearing that day was the Surgeon General, Dr.
C. Everett Koop. Scheduled to relinquish his post a few days later,
Koop had not cleared his testimony with the White House and said
subsequently that had he attempted to do so the White House would
certainly have quashed it. One can see why. There is, Koop said, the
"perception " among ministers of health he has encountered at
international meetings that "our trade policy is to push addicting
substances into foreign markets, disregarding the sentiment of the
foreign government and the future health of its population." Attempts
to force Thailand to rescind "wise restrictions" on cigarette use and
promotion were "egregious," "deplorable," "unconscionable" and, apart
from anything else, interference with the sovereignty of another
nation. "Years from now," Koop concluded, "I'm afraid that our nation
will look back on this application of free trade policy and find it
scandalous, as the rest of the world does now....at a time when we are
pleading with foreign governments to stop the export of cocaine, it is
the height of hypocrisy for the United States to export tobacco."

"Consider these figures," Koop ended. "Last year [1988] in the United
States, 2,000 people died from cocaine. In the same year, cigarettes
killed 390,000 people."

In the wake of President Bush's September 5 speech on drugs, 163
drug-related stories appeared on the three major network newscasts
alone. No such saturation attended one of the most savage
denunciations of U.S. government policy ever made by one of its own
appointed officials. There was some coverage by ABC, the Today show
and MacNeil/Lehrer but in the national newspapers, so far as I could
tell, only The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor
reported on the hearings. The fact that the United States, as a matter
of conscious national policy, is by far the most consequential drug
trafficker in the world today remains largely obscured.

The Pushers Head East
=====================

The strategy of the major U.S. tobacco companies is scarcely a secret.
Their prospective customers are increasingly to be found among the
poor, at home and abroad. Ghetto kids in America trade crack in the
shadow of billboards promoting tobacco. In industrialized nations,
the smoking rate is decreasing by 1.5 percent a year. To keep profits
stable the industry needs 2.5 million new smokers a year to replace
those who either break their addiction or die. To find those new
addicts the tobacco companies are focusing their energies on Asia.

[...]In Asia cigarette consumption in increasing by 5.5 percent
annually, and smokers throughout the region are consuming about half
the U.S. export. America's tobacco czars quiver contemplating the
Chinese market, estimated to be worth $6 billion a year.

Light Up in Asia
================

After 1975 the U.S. cigarette Export Association (a far more potent
relative of the Medelli'n cartel, composed of the top three tobacco
companies, R.J. Reynolds, Philip Morris and Brown & Williamson)
pressured Japan and other Far Eastern countries to remove their trade
barriers against cigarette imports. Finally, in quick succession,
Japan (1986), Taiwan (1987) and South Korea (1988) all crumpled under
the onslaught of the tobacco peddlers and their agents.

President Reagan called upon U.S. Trade Representative Clayton Yeutter
to brandish the weapon of Section 301. The tobacco companies enlisted
former Reagan aides such as Michael Deaver, Richard Allen and
Alexander Haig to lobby on their behalf. In July 1985, Deaver met with
President Chun Doo Hwan of South Korea for seventy-five minutes,
pressing the cause of Philip Morris. A year later Senator Jesse Helms
dispatched a letter to Japan's Prime Minister Nakasone urging that a
20 percent domestic market share be allotted to U.S. cigarettes and
intimating that his own support for a substantial U.S. defense
presence in the Pacific depended on a favorable decision. In fact, the
existence of influence peddling in this area might make the HUD
scandal look demure.

On October 26, 1986, a week before important Southern Congressional
races, Reagan announced that Japan had agreed to U.S. demands.
Fourteen months later American cigarettes had already captured 13
percent of the Japanese market. R.J. Reynolds had to weather some
adverse comment in the Japanese press when a consignment of more than
160 million Winston Lights was found to be contaminated with a weed
killer called Dicamba [...] By the close of 1988 cigarette advertising
on Japanese television had jumped from fortieth to second place in
terms of total air time. About 90 percent of Japan's new smokers are
adolescents, which is generally consistent with a world-wide pattern
that each day sees 5,000 kids turn on to tobacco for the first time.
The advertisements are aimed primarily at women and the young. My
colleague Deborah Sklar, who assembled much of the research presented
here, remarks that in Japan the women she knew who smoked tended to
think of themselves as taking a liberated stance in a society where it
is still somewhat taboo for women to smoke. About 63 percent of
Japanese men smoke, as against some 13 percent of the women. During
her two years in Japan, Sklar was frequently offered packs of
cigarettes by pretty young women doing promotion on the street,
particularly around discos and clubs (In 1929 the American P.R. man
Edward Bernays prompted young women to light up Lucky Strikes as a
demonstration of independence.)

[...]

In fact, the social and health consequences of cocaine trade from the
Andes are trivial when compared with the horrors that U.S. tobacco
traffickers are inflicting upon the Third World. In 1986 the World
Health Organization (W.H.O.) stated that "it is probable that a
smoking-related disease epidemic, similar to what has been observed in
the more developed countries, will strike the developing world as
well.  The effect in the developing world, however, would be more
disastrous because these preventable diseases would be additional to
the communicable diseases and problems that have still to be brought
under control."

The Medelli'n cartel has shown itself to have a certain macabre humor
in its war with the Colombian government. It should retain some
appropriate lobbyist -- Deaver would surely be equal to the task -- to
lodge with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative a formal
protest against U.S. barriers to free trade in cocaine and file a
petition against these unfair trade practices, citing the precedent of
the tobacco companies. Then at last the press might take an interest
in the true kingpins of the world's drug trade.

##################################################################

[Excerpted from Alexander Cockburn's bi-weekly column Beat The Devil in
The Nation, October 30, 1989 (write me for subscription info)]