TheJakartaPost

Please Update your browser

Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.

Jakarta Post

Selling smokes with smut

Is the lawmakers’ priority the physical health of its citizens, or the financial health of the tobacco industry?

Duncan Graham (The Jakarta Post)
Premium
Malang
Tue, June 20, 2017

Share This Article

Change Size

Selling smokes with smut Three workers pose for a picture in the Rizona Baru cigar factory in Temanggung, Central Java. Temanggung is known as a tobacco producing regency in Indonesia. (JP/Agung Parameswara)

P

oliticians debating a new tobacco bill might want to look at the way the addictive is marketed. Indonesia is one of only eight countries that’s neither a signatory nor a party to the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. That puts the republic way offside with the 180 states that ban or limit advertisements promoting smoking, and prompts this question for legislators:

Is the lawmakers’ priority the physical health of its citizens, or the financial health of the tobacco industry?

Big advertisements in public places linking a deadly product with good times and sexual prowess sounds like debauched Europe, degenerate Australia or too-liberal America — but surely not in upright, uptight Indonesia? Yet that’s happening.

Exposure of a workshop producing drugs to corrode young bodies would provide a feast month for the media. There would be leaks to TV stations of raids, lurid details in tabloids pushing the limits of taste and manufactured outrage.

The sleaze-masters involved in marketing by shooting the pix, hiring the models, writing the scripts, printing and distribution would be publicly hounded before being convicted.

Yet suggestive smut is on display right now and few seem concerned. Transgressors have no fear of sudden bursts of Kopassus AK-47 fire; prisoners will not gulp cleaning fluid to avoid interrogation.

Instead the guilty continue to work in high-rise comfort, enjoy top salaries and get home early to their kids, for these people are nicotine promoters — a protected species in Indonesia: The untouchables’ job is to boost Big Tobacco and ramp sales by devising ways to get citizens hooked.

to Read Full Story

We accept

TJP - Visa
TJP - Mastercard
TJP - GoPay
{

Your Opinion Counts

Your thoughts matter - share your experiences, suggestions, and any issues you've encountered on The Jakarta Post. We're here to listen.

Enter at least 30 characters
0 / 30

Thank You

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. We appreciate your feedback.