The ex-smoking tobacco CEO who wants government to ban cigarettes

The CEO of Philip Morris International was in London a couple of weeks ago.

As I wrote here, the theme of Jacek Olczak’s short speech at the UnHerd Club in Westminster was ‘the impact of inaction when it comes to addressing smoking rates worldwide’.

He also says a date should be set to ban cigarettes:

‘Looking at what the UK is doing in the car industry, saying that as of a certain year you are not allowed to produce petrol cars, we could have this with tobacco too,’ he told the Mail.

I know, I know. Yawn, yawn.

This, after all, is not the first time PMI has called for a ban on the sale of cigarettes (in the UK at least). Two years ago the company generated global headlines with this announcement:

Philip Morris International says it will stop selling Marlboro cigarettes in Britain within a decade as it called on the UK government to ban the sale of its tobacco products.

If you're wondering why PMI is so keen for the UK government to prohibit cigarettes, it's worth noting (again) that the company's share of the UK cigarette market is less than ten per cent, far behind that of JTI and Imperial who between them have something like 80 per cent of the market.

With this in mind, who would suffer most from a ban on the sale of cigarettes in the UK? Not Philip Morris, that's for sure.

Furthermore, as Forest pointed out in our response:

"If Philip Morris want to leave smoking behind, good luck to them, but banning cigarettes won't stop people smoking. It will simply drive the product into the hands of criminal gangs who will happily sell illicit and counterfeit cigarettes to anyone who wants them, including children."

But back to CEO Jacek Olczak. According to the Mail:

Olczak was himself a smoker for two decades until he tried the brand’s IQOS heated tobacco device.

Oh, the joy of the convert! Not content with finding a pleasurable alternative to cigarettes that has enabled him to quit smoking after 20 years, Olczak wants to deny future generations the choice of doing exactly what he did as a younger man.

Funnily enough, I've been a mini cheerleader for IQOS, PMI's heated tobacco product, for seven or eight years, having first encountered it in Switzerland, before it was on sale in the UK.

Swiss radio presenter Mark Butcher, an occasional visitor to this blog, convinced me that it was a good product and a great replacement for the cigarettes he used to smoke.

Other users (not all) have said much the same to me, and I've passed the feedback on, both here and in media interviews.

But the point is this. If e-cigarettes, heated tobacco, and nicotine pouches are good enough there ought to be no need to ban a 'rival' nicotine product that's already hidden from view in shops.

That's not how a free market should work, which is why I find it disappointing that free market think tanks and consumer groups turn a blind eye to PMI's prohibitionist agenda.

Make cigarettes 'obsolete', if you can, by producing better, less harmful, and equally pleasurable products, but as we've said again and again and again, this is about choice, and as long as there are adults who prefer to smoke cigarettes rather than switch to other nicotine products, that choice must be respected.

Truth is, I'm getting a bit sick of PMI's grandstanding and hypocrisy on this issue.

We all know why the company can't or won't stop selling cigarettes unilaterally in the UK or globally. As I wrote here, it was spelled out by the company in an answer to a question on PMI's LinkedIn event page only two weeks ago:

Discontinuing cigarette sales without addressing the demand for cigarettes would not put an end to smoking. It simply would result in competitors and the illicit trade filling the market space. We are fully committed to doing all we can to ensure that #smokefree products that are scientifically substantiated to be less harmful replace cigarettes as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, to quote the Mail again:

PMI's sale of cigarettes are still strong in the Middle East, Africa, south-east Asia and the Americas.

In other words, the company is still dependent on the sale of cigarettes (currently two thirds of its revenue) and while PMI's investors may enjoy being associated with a company that likes to bathe in the warm glow of its own anti-smoking rhetoric, I can't imagine they want the company to walk away from what is still its major source of revenue, and profits.

To be clear, I don't have an issue with PMI going in whatever direction it likes. What concerns me is when the company calls on government to ban the sale of all cigarettes, that would (a) prohibit others from producing a product still enjoyed by millions of consumers, and (b) fuel a huge black market in illegal and counterfeit cigarettes.

If PMI execs hate cigarettes so much then the only credible path, surely, is to set their own date to unilaterally stop manufacturing and selling the product, after which they can focus exclusively on heated tobacco, vapes and nicotine pouches, leaving the cigarette market to others.

It won't end smoking, but at what point did that become PMI's great mission?