A review of internal tobacco industry documents going back decades has uncovered a campaign to link abstinence from tobacco to extremism, says the international study co-authored in Canada.
The campaign went so far as to hire lawyers to make theological arguments against Islamic leaders opposed to tobacco use.
“The paper shows how the industry has sought to distort and misinterpret the cultural beliefs of these communities, and to reinterpret them to serve the industry’s interests. All to sell a product that kills half of its customers,” Kelley Lee, a professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University and co-author of the study, tells Yahoo Canada News.
Public health campaigns against smoking have been very successful in western countries. But as smoking rates have declined in North America and Europe, cigarette manufacturers have increasingly turned to low- and middle-income countries for growth. » | Dene Moore | Daily Brew | Monday, April 20, 2015
