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Selling smokes with smut
Is the lawmakers’ priority the physical health of its citizens, or the financial health of the tobacco industry?
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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.
