Medicines Australia responds below to a recent article, published by Croakey and the Crikey bulletin, which investigated the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing lobby group which opposes Australia’s introduction of plain packaging of cigarettes, and whose members include pharmaceutical and tobacco companies.
Dr Brendan Shaw, Chief Executive of Medicines Australia, writes:
Wednesday’s article under the headline “What have the tobacco and pharma industries got in common?” completely misrepresented the pharmaceutical industry’s attitude towards plain packaging of tobacco products and to smoking more broadly.
This misrepresentation was grounded in the assumption that companies supporting a lobby organisation – in this case the American Legislative Exchange Council – are obliged to support every policy position taken by that group.
ALEC’s advocacy platform spans myriad policy issues covering many sectors and it is unlikely that every one of its members supports every one of its policy positions.
Certainly, the suggestion that a healthcare industry such as the medicines industry is opposed to a public policy measure that will encourage consumers to stop smoking is counter-intuitive, inherently contradictory and patently wrong.
In fact, two of Australia’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers laid out very clearly their position on this issue in Wednesday’s article and are quoted:
“Pfizer fully supports plain packaging in the spirit of preventing future generations of smokers.”
And GSK said: “If ALEC is lobbying the Australian government as you have suggested, they are not doing this on behalf of GSK and we do not support it.”
Furthermore, GSK has a statement posted on the homepage of its website which reads, in part: “We absolutely do not endorse or support the views of organisations that campaign on behalf of the tobacco industry against anti-smoking measures.”
These two companies could hardly have made their position clearer and the suggestion in the article that they have a different position is disingenuous. For the record, Medicines Australia supports the Australian Government’s legislation to introduce plain packaging for tobacco products and has no issue with it.
The business of the pharmaceutical industry is to develop medicines and vaccines that save lives, reduce pain and prevent disease. If companies were to depart from this ethos, the commercial basis for their existence and their value proposition to the community would disintegrate.
Companies invest billions of dollars in medical research to develop smoking cessation medicines that are designed to help smokers quit.
So the conspiracy theorists have it very wrong. Two of Australia’s leading medicines companies indicated in Wednesday’s Croakey article that they support plain packaging of tobacco products.
The suggestion that pharmaceutical companies would deliberately promote smoking to boost sales of smoking cessation medicines is ridiculous and, frankly, insulting to all those people working in those companies who invest their time and energy every day in improving peoples’ health.
Medicines Australia supports plain packaging of tobacco products because it will discourage people from smoking, reduce smoking rates at a population level, improve health outcomes and ultimately save lives. And that’s the business we’re in. I can’t put it plainer than that.
For GSK & Pfizer, it’s rather convenient to be able to support a popular position while washing their hands of lobbying that has been enabled by the fact that they support the organisation. Are they committing to no future support for ALEC? Or that they will work to change ALEC’s position on this?
I mean.. they’re on the governance board, right? Which suggests there is probably a financial relationship as well.
It’s not what you say, it’s what you do. And money talks.
This is basically the same arguments and excuses provided by the 30+ US corporations that have withdrawn from ALEC; claiming they had no interest or participation in legislation that did not impact directly upon their business interests.
As Tully pointed out, their financial support through membership allows ALEC to continue their agenda on other fronts. What many are still unaware of is that ALEC has an International Relations Task Force that includes 17 members representing foreign governments/nations. These are full voting members taking part in helping develop proposed US laws and policies.
One of these foreign voting members is Australia’s Senator Cory Bernardi who helped develop ALEC’s “Resolution Urging Congress to Pass a Ban on Plain Packaging” here in the US. The Private corporate chair of that ALEC task force is Philip Morris’ Brandie Davis who sponsored this bill/resolution. ALEC and the IRTF have been lobbying this legislation internationally for two years now, in Australia, the UK, EU, etc.
Should other corporations leave ALEC, their influence and manipulation of the laws and policies of most countries would be much safer.
Medicines Australia’s response is utterly disingenuous and fails to provide any evidence that my article misrepresented the pharmaceutical industry. The article was grounded in the lack of evidence of GSK and Pfizer either publicly or actively supporting plain packaging or lobbying against the ALEC position. Comments by GSK and Pfizer in response to an unflattering article, together with an anodyne comment on the GSK homepage, do not constitute a clear position in favour of plain packaging. Neither company has demonstrated any other public support for it.
Both Pfizer and GSK have executives sitting on the ALEC Private Enterprise Board (along with several other pharmaceutical industry representatives). Did any of those members raise concerns about ALEC’s decision to lobby against plain packaging, in any country where it is considered? If they are so opposed to ALEC lobbying against plain packaging, the ALEC Board would have been an appropriate place to raise their concerns. One can only conclude that the pharmaceutical industry is content for ALEC to aggressively lobbying against increased regulation, whether it favours the tobacco or pharmaceutical industries.
I did not suggest that the pharmaceutical companies are deliberately promoting smoking. However, as the Medicines Australia response states “companies invest billions of dollars in medical research to develop smoking cessation medicines that are designed to help smokers quit.” There is no evidence that the pharmaceutical companies are actively lobbying in favour of initiatives such as plain packaging, which will ultimately kill the goose that laid the golden egg.