Drinks industry has learnt from tobacco companies, study says

Alcohol and tobacco companies have worked closely to share information and strategies in their fight against public health initiatives, a new Australian study says.

The researchers analysed 29 alcohol related documents retrieved from the millions of confidential tobacco industry papers that have been published online as a result of the Master Settlement Agreement in the United States in 1998, an agreement between four tobacco firms and the attorneys general of 46 US states.

The study, published in the Australasian Medical Journal this week (doi:10.4066/AMJ.2010.363), found that the two industries used similar marketing strategies, including product placement and targeting young people and specific ethnic groups.

“They develop and provide potentially counterproductive public education campaigns so as to appear socially responsible and in an effort to deflect tighter controls on products,” the researchers said.

“Further, it can be drawn from these documents that the alcohol industry is concerned about public health groups and governments implementing similar strategies for alcohol products that have been used to regulate and control tobacco.”

The study included a 1998 document showing how the Miller Brewing Company, bought by the Philip Morris tobacco company in 1970, identified “tobacco proactive efforts” that could be used to help counter the threat of new taxes and regulations on alcohol.

The suggested strategies included developing allies, promoting personal responsibility, and seeking legislative opportunities such as bills on privacy and antidiscrimination.

A 1995 document showed that Miller and Philip Morris shared their databases of beer drinkers and smokers.

It said that Miller had rented names from a Philip Morris database for direct mail programmes and that in 1994 Miller had embedded a question about smoking in a survey of beer drinkers. “The names are considered ‘leads’ for PM [Philip Morris],” the document says.

One of the study’s authors, Mike Daube, professor of health policy at Curtin University in Perth, told the BMJ it was important that policy makers understood how these industries worked.

“The more we know about them, the better placed we are to counter their influences,” he said. “Unfortunately one of the really big lessons we’ve learnt about both industries is that you can never be too cynical.”

Professor Daube said that the documents reinforced the importance of public health experts not working with tobacco or alcohol companies.

“It’s very clear that the motivation of these industries is to sell as much product as they can and to undermine public health,” he said. “Anyone working with these industries is part of their promotional programme.”

Another of the authors, Tanya Chikritzhs, of the National Drug Research Institute at Curtin University, said that the strategies described in the documents were still in use, as evidenced by the industry’s recent campaign in Australia against an increase in taxes on premixed spirits, or alcopops, favoured by young people.

“These documents have been a real boon in informing public health policy and advocacy, because they give us a heads-up on what to expect from the alcohol industry,” Professor Chikritzhs said. “There is a tendency among some policy makers and legislators to prefer to see industry activity in a more positive light than it perhaps should be.”

However, Stephen Riden, a spokesman for the Distilled Spirits Industry Council of Australia, said that any similarity between the tobacco and alcohol industries’ responses was because they faced the same calls for the same restrictions and regulations from the same non-governmental organisations.

“The article deliberately constructs similarities in the activities of the two industries, albeit fairly weakly,” he said.

Simon Chapman, professor of public health at the University of Sydney and a prominent advocate of tobacco control, said that researchers should also be investigating the use of similar strategies by the food industry.

“It’s obvious to me, as somebody who’s been principally involved in tobacco but more recently started to take an interest in alcohol and food, that there are shared strategies,” he said.

“These [strategies] are voluntary codes of conduct, providing air cover, [and] wholesome initiatives that are very difficult to criticise—like public education campaigns, provision of information, and helplines—while at the same time actively working to resist, erode, weaken, and destroy any form of top-down activity or tax policy that would have the capacity to seriously impact on their bottom line.”