Philip Morris International overall manager Jacek Olczac told policymakers and media representatives and politicians that cigarettes belong in museums in a speech in the UnHerd Club in London. He urged governments to take action to support the transition to less harmful alternatives to smoking by bringing the examples of Sweden and Japan and briefly of the United Kingdom.
Jacek Olczac said that smoking rates were driven down in Japan where a new form of tobacco was introduced to the market in 2014 in comparison to Singapore where alternative forms of tobacco are banned and where smoking rates went up as a result. He said that Sweden has a smoking prevalence of currently 5% which is as much as other states have the ambition of reaching in their “smoke-free” future targets of 2030, 2025 for Australia and New Zealand or 2035 for the whole of the EU, in comparison to other countries of the EU where Swedish snus are banned by the organisation where smoking rates are more than double the 5% and 350,000 lives could be saved by legalising them.
Jacek Olczac said that “The cigarettes belong in museums” in the middle of his speech which he ended in the same way by saying that “It’s time to work towards the common goal of delivering effective policies that make cigarettes a historical artifact, a museum piece collecting dust behind glass cases.”.
It is most commonly known that the only way that an invention would head for the museum is if it is replaced by another invention that works better or more. Something else that does the same as that and above.
Cigarettes are a different invention from their electronic alternatives and both are not the same. Every invention however had to be invented, both electronic cigarettes and even cigarettes themselves which are an invention that also had to be invented. Suggesting that cigarettes must find their way in the museum is equivalent to believing that their alternatives are the same and even better which they are both different to each other.
While many people who smoke were able to stop using alternatives that satisfied them up to the same level, there is a big minority of smokers who maintain their appreciation of the real thing of authentic cigarettes who cannot give them up because their alternatives do not provide the same level of satisfaction for them, and hence the two are not exactly the same with each other. Rather than making needless threats towards them that what they depend on must become part of museum history, it would be more effective to propose the registration of the cigarette as a patent in the Americas, so that this particular invention is not insulted by the law of other countries like Great Britain which mentioned it first as something that exists, that is bad instead of good, because the basis of its existence has been its invention and not its reference through the legislation and punishable laws that are limiting, restricting and punishing its use with fines, which deserves to be registered as a patent instead.
This also carries a cultural and historical dimension of not punishing American Indians with the law of other places for practising their religion and culture, not to punish anyone else for doing the same as they do. Philip Morris’ overall manager is going to find many of them in the same museum that he likes to refer to, especially if Americans are living among ghosts across the land!
Bring Back Smoking Freedom 