A statement of warning

P. 270
Edell, however, refused to read any writing on any walls. He acknowledged openly that Rose Cipollone was aware of the risks of smoking. Yes, she had read the warning labels on cigarettes and the numerous magazine articles cut out so painstakingly by Tony Cipollone. Yet, unable to harness her habit, she had remained addicted. Cipollone was far from innocent, Edell conceded. But what mattered was what cigarette makers knew, and how much of the cancer risk they had revealed to consumers such as Rose.
...
In one letter, Fred Panzer, a public relations manager at the Tobacco Research Institute, wrote to Horace Kornegay, its president, to explain the industry's three-pronged marketing strategy - "creating doubt about the heath charge without actually denying it, advocating the public's right to smoke without actually urging them to take up the practice [and] encouraging objective scientific research as the only way to resolve the question of health hazard." In another internal memorandum (marked "confidential"), the assertions were nearly laughably perverse: "In a sense, the tobacco industry may be thought of as a specialized, highly ritualized and stylized segment of the pharmaceutical industry. Tobacco products, uniquely, contain and deliver nicotine, a potent drug with a variety of physiological effects."
P. 274
This steady assault of tobacco on the developing world has been accompanied by bold political maneuvering backstage. In 2004, tobacco companies signed a barely publicized agreement with the Ministry of Health in Mexico that provides generous "contributions" from the tobacco makers to a public health-insurance program in return for sharply reduced regulations on cigarette-packet warnings and advertisements - in effect "robbing Pedro to pay Paolo," as a recent editorial noted. In the early 1990s, a study noted, BAT signed a similar agreement with the government of Uzbekistan to establish a production monopoly, then lobbied vigorously to overturn recent laws that banned tobacco advertising. Cigarette smoking grew by about 8% a year in Uzbekistan after the BAT investment, and cigarette sales increased by 50% between 1990 and 1996. 

In a recent editorial in the British Medical Journal, Stanton Glantz, and epidemiologist at the UCSF, described this as yet another catastrophe in the making: "Multinational cigarette companies act as a vector that spreads disease and death throughout the world. This is largely because the tobacco industry uses its wealth to influence politicians to create a favourable environment to promote smoking. The industry does so by minimizing restrictions on advertising and promotion and by preventing effective public policies for tobacco control such as high taxes, strong graphic warning labels on packets, smoke-free workplaces and public places, aggressive countermarketing media campaigns, and advertising bans. Unlike mosquitoes, another vector of worldwide disease, the tobacco companies quickly transfer the information and strategies they learn in one part of the world to others."
P.275
Yet despite the evident seriousness of the addiction and its long-term consequences, tobacco consumption continues relatively unfettered even today. Smoking rates, having plateaued for decades, have begun to rise again in certain demographic pockets, and lackluster antismoking campaigns have lost their grip on public imagination. The disjunction between the threat and the response is widening. It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars.