Let’s call it World No Smoking Day

It's World No Tobacco Day. How should a company that sells tobacco products approach such a milestone?

Some who don’t know us very well might think we would switch off our phones and head to the hills. Or put out a statement drafted by the finest brains from our legal team. It may surprise you to hear that at PMI, we are welcoming this day as an opportunity to seek others to join in the conversation about giving up cigarettes.

However, if you’ve been paying attention, it shouldn’t surprise you at all. In recent years, since announcing our commitment to switch our business from cigarettes to smoke-free alternatives, we’ve started to re-engage with civil society. So we welcome this opportunity to talk about giving up cigarettes. 

We want the world’s one billion plus adult smokers to quit, or if they don’t, to choose better alternatives as soon as possible. That might sound surprising coming from a tobacco company. It might also be dismissed as insincere by the anti-smoking lobby — to which we would say that investing over $6 billion into the research, development and commercialization of smoke-free alternatives to cigarettes is not something you do unless you are really very serious. 

But we do have a problem with World No Tobacco Day. And it is this: It demonizes the tobacco plant rather than the way the plant is consumed. Just as oil is relatively benign in its natural state beneath the earth’s surface, tobacco is likewise mostly harmless — until it is burned and its smoke is inhaled. That is when the main problems begin. 

The World Health Organizations (WHO) uncompromising stance also turns the tobacco debate into a binary question, pitting smokers against nonsmokers and encouraging the idea that there is only one solution: quit. In making this an either/or proposition, they’re failing to acknowledge the changing ways in which nicotine and tobacco can be consumed. 

Unfortunately, as we know from the WHO’s own projections the number of 1.1 billion adults smoking in the world today is estimated to remain unchanged over the next five years. More needs to be done in addition to the anti-smoking measures already in place to encourage cessation and prevent initiation. Indeed, if all tobacco and nicotine containing products are treated the same, adult smokers who don’t quit will not know they have a better option. They are condemned to continuing to smoke. 

There is another way, and that is to see smoke-free products as better alternatives to continued smoking. There is consensus in the scientific community that the primary cause of smoking related diseases are the high levels of harmful chemicals in the smoke of a burning cigarette. So, when there’s no combustion, there is no smoke. Heated tobacco and e-cigarettes are not risk free and they are addictive, but they do have the potential to be less harmful than cigarettes—and an effective tool to help address a global public health problem.

That’s why we welcome World No Tobacco Day — but we’d much rather celebrate it as World No Smoking Day. The tobacco debate is not black and white. There are shades of gray in between, and not all tobacco products are equally bad. Smoking is the real issue, and global efforts should focus on that. 

 Recently we launched a campaign to #Unsmoke your world. It has the simple message: 

If you don’t smoke, don’t start 

If you smoke, quit

If you don’t quit, change

We are passionate about the importance of this message. And we believe that it’s more effective today — and better for public health and all our future Fridays — than telling people that their only option is to quit.