How big tobacco lost its final fight for hearts, lungs and minds

[malaise]

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/22/big-tobacco-final-fight-cigarette-branding-uk
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There was a finality about it all, a sense that after half a century something was coming to an end. As David Anderson QC, one of “big tobacco’s” senior lawyers, put it, the battle against the introduction of plain packaging for cigarettes had become the industry’s equivalent of Custer’s Last Stand, its “last battlefield”.

Legal hyperbole perhaps, but also an indication of just what the tobacco industry believed was at stake last week when the high court handed down its landmark judgment rejecting a coordinated attempt by the world’s four largest cigarette manufacturers to derail the new EU regulations that came into effect on Friday.

The new tobacco directive means graphic health warnings with photos, text and cessation information must cover 65% of the front and the back of cigarette and roll-your-own tobacco packs. Member states have 12 months to sell old stock, and up to four years to sell menthol and flavoured cigarettes, which were banned outright.

The EU directive also allowed the UK to go further and parliament voted last March by a majority of 254 MPs to introduce its own regulations, requiring all tobacco products to be sold in uniformly drab green-brown packaging with large images designed to act as health warnings. Having failed to overturn the changes at the European court of justice last month, big tobacco hoped it could succeed in front of a British judge.

However, hailed by health campaigners as something that will save lives, not just in the UK but around the world, Mr Justice Green’s ruling – rejecting an application for a judicial review into the government’s regulations – laid bare, in embarrassing and irrefutable detail, how cigarette companies have targeted young people.

The ruling was the full stop to a story that had its glamorous beginnings in the Mad Men era of the 1960s, when Hollywood made smoking fashionable, but which became ever darker as the tobacco industry connived to suppress evidence of the health risks posed by cigarettes, its role in smuggling its products around the world, how it routinely bribed governments and officials not to legislate against it and the way it identified developing countries as lucrative markets for exploitation.