It was in mid-October last year when Health Minister Datuk Dr Chua Soi Lek announced that all cigarette advertisements and billboards had to be removed by the end January. However, if you go around sundry shops, coffeeshops and other cigarette retail outlets, you will most likely see that the ban has been ignored by many.
While the new calendars and posters do not have cigarette brands on them, it is still very obvious what brands they represents from their colour scheme that they sport. One tobacco company has even printed its name (in abbreviation) on its posters.
Besides new posters, old ones can still be found on the walls of coffeeshops mostly. I cannot comprehend why tobacco companies have failed to get retail outlets to remove these posters as required by law.
There is no excuse - the ban was announced four months ago - and we are not talking about fixtures that require tools to remove. They are posters stuck to the wall using double-sided foam tape and I have seen distributing agents rip their competitors' posters from the wall of a coffeeshop only to replace them with their own. It took them less than five minutes to get the ‘offending’ posters down.
Moreover, distributing vans have been supplying cigarettes to these retail outlets over the past months and yet the agents have miserably failed to see that the ban is observed. The tobacco companies should haul up these distributing agents as it is obvious that they have placed business before legal compliance.
There should be no question about tobacco companies complying because on the first page of the International Tobacco Products Marketing Standards it clearly states that ‘... any more restrictive legal requirement or voluntary undertaking shall take precedence over these Standards’.
The Marketing Standards, ironically, are self-regulatory guidelines formulated by the tobacco industry and implemented in September 2001, long before the Malaysian government instituted the advertising ban.
Tobacco control advocates are not paranoids as some may think but then again, the above is what the industry is doing while asking tobacco control advocates to entrust it with self-regulations. Can we? Tobacco products are not just any consumer product - they kill the users and innocent bystanders.
The writer is attached to the Clearinghouse for Tobacco Control, National Poisons Centre, Universiti Sains Malaysia.
No. 48, Jalan Kemuja, Bangsar Utama 59000 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
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