SELLING CANCER? BEST TRY INDONESIA

 WHO RUNS INDONESIA?  TAKE A WHIFF

\Indonesian politicians are getting in a righteous tizzy over child protection. Their target is online pornography and gambling, and their condemnation is absolute. Curiously absent is another kiddy-harming vice that reportedly takes more than 200,000 lives a year.  

Next time you hand over a fifty to fuel a filthy habit, you'll wonder where to get coffin nails cheaper without getting caught in a Melbourne gang war.

Ponder no longer, dear reader.  We’re here to help. Nirvana’s next door.

You can indulge, avoid guilt from reading ghastly health warnings and have a splendid holiday.  And all before your next visit to an oncologist.

Addicts’ paradise is close - a bit over three hours if you live on the west coast, far less if flying from Darwin.

Once you've cleared Immigration and the money changers (tip - rates are better outside the airport)  taxi  to any convenience store and spend up.

For a pack-a-day person,  a two-week supply will cost around forty to fifty Oz bucks depending on the brand - and there are more than 3,000.

That's a saving of $700 - the cost of getting there. The bad news is importing. Oz Customs will sniff out your load.

Other expenses will be hotel and food between hacks, but also a fraction of Australian prices.  We only die once so why not enjoy, then come home to a cancer ward and covered by Medicare?

Political scientists should also make the journey north to witness the power of big baccy much of it overseas owned.  It makes the Australian fossil-fuel lobby look like the  CWA.

Tobacco control in Indonesia is as sensitive as gun control in the US. Proposed reforms get stymied.  Armageddon is threatened with every hint of public health trumping corporate profits.

Indonesia is supposed to be the only country in the world allowing ads for fags. The chair of the National Commission for Child Protection, Arist Merdeka Sirait, has been quoted :

 "The cigarette industry has defied Indonesian law. The government has been defeated by the cigarette industry."

 Ads show lads having grand adventures, scaling mountains, abseiling, and bush camping with mates.  In the pictures and videos, they're all young sporting heroes, ripping fit, clearly never touching the product they're promoting.

Some images show handsome professionals at laptops, struggling with ideas for a mighty project, then finding their creativity fires up with the snap of a lighter.

The cheekiest twist our slogan in English:  NEVER QUIT  often shows a sweating sportsman supposedly winning.

A favourite has a stack of white coffee cups with the top one steaming.  This flicks away the prohibition of showing the white stick.

Bans on the word 'mild' get bypassed with clever typography:  MLD is printed with the upright stroke on the L made bold.

To protect the kiddies no ads on TV till 9.30 pm.   So they’re shown on huge street screens at school route intersections, starting at 6 am.

There's a health message as a footer, usually a small photo of an ancient with a tracheotomy.  But we can't hear him gasping for life and don't know his name.  Could be an AI hoax.

Although there's some small text about the dangers its drowned by images of fun and success.  Occasionally a pretty woman peeps from behind but she's there to admire and reinforce.  Smokers get the gals, right?

A few trendy metro ladies light up to show they can keep up, but in this depressing story here's something positive: In Indonesian culture, a woman fingering a fag, however proper her appearance and morals, is reckoned to be a prostitute.

Advocates for women’s equality will rightly be enraged by this gross generality, but the reality is that the slur is effective; less than four per cent of adult women smoke.

The figure for men,70 per cent for over 14s, shows warnings aren't working.  Why should they?  In any group bonding with baccy, no one will know of anyone with a hole in their throat.

On the contrary, nearby will be an oldie with egg yolk fingers who's never been sick in his life - so here's proof that smoking doesn't kill. When Allah calls time's up. No need for an autopsy to find cause.

A few health-conscious cities ban smoking ads,  bravely forgoing the revenue raised by taxing  displays.

Overall the industry gives the government about AUD 13.6 billion. This year the excise ramped to Rp 1,193 a stick - about nine Ozzie cents.  

In Australia it’s almost $1.30, apparently making smokes in our country the dearest in the world.  The idea was high prices would force users to quit.  Instead it has created a new criminal industry flogging cheaper imports.

There’s a black trade in Indonesia selling leaf from small farmers seeking a better return on their crops. The government’s response has been even bigger billboards warning of penalties for selling black baccy.

These feature stern old men in uniform and oceans of text.

They’re no match for the leaping studs selling a clear and simple message:  Your life is humdrum, you’re locked into poverty and boredom.

Seeking  escape?  Just cough up the cash - three lousy bucks.

PS: While in Indonesia inhale some of the culture and taste real adventure.

##

First published in Independent Australia, 5 July 2024: : https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/tobacco-industry-leaving-indonesia-up-in-smoke,18744

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE FAG END OF IMMORAL BUSINESS

Don’t quit – we’re addicted to your suffering  

                             

Cancer wards in Indonesia should have special visitor viewing areas. Like club boxes at sporting events, the spectators would watch the count-down while the watched gasp their way to the siren.

These observatories will be solely for VIPs – Very Immoral People. This group includes tobacco company executives and their advertising agents. In the country next door they work in a barely regulated market, vigorously promoting a product which they know kills, cripples and impoverishes.

According to Australian cancer clinics, smoking more than doubles the chances of a heart attack or stroke; it’s responsible for 85 per cent of lung cancers.  This isn’t fake news – it’s science scripture.

Getting the VIPs to witness their customers’ agonies might be difficult.  Even if attendance was compulsory these guys are seriously rich; in Indonesia they’d buy their way out of any obligation.

Indonesia is one of just eight countries that’s neither a signatory nor a party to the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.  That puts the Republic way offside with the 180 states which ban or limit ads promoting smoking.

East Java is the heartland of tobacco production and Malang is at the centre.  There’s a cigarette factory directly opposite a Dutch era church and the town square. Even the banks don’t enjoy such a prestigious position.

Malang is also an education city supporting 28 tertiary institutions. Two of the biggest, the Universities of Malang and Brawijaya (around 30,000 students each) plus high schools spill their young learners onto a major road leading to the CBD.

At the first traffic lights they’re confronted by a giant billboard.  It reads in English: NEVER QUIT.  So they don’t.

More than 67 per cent of males over 15 smoke according to Indonesia’s Health Ministry. (The good news is that only three per cent of adult women are users.)

The Ministry predicts that unless serious attempts are made to butt-out the nation will lead the world in smokers by 2030. At the moment it’s number four after China, Russia and the US. While these countries are nudging public health ahead of tobacco company profits, Indonesian firms plan to double output.

That means building a market as the addicts wheeze away at a rate of around 400,000 a year.  So the kids need an introduction to Lady Nicotine who’ll mask facts with fantasies.  

What do lads want?  Fun times, macho adventure, staunch mates and gorgeous girlfriends.  Available for the rich, but few are so lucky.  The rest are puffing to find ‘satisfaction’, to ‘be bold’, become part of the ‘new generation’ and ‘get ahead’. 

That’s what the ads say – and not just in words.  Pictures show the healthiest and happiest youngsters any nation would be proud to display at the Olympics.  Marketing isn’t supposed to target minors so the agencies use adult models with teen features dancing, leaping, singing – all the things coughers can’t do.

Close to 30 million Indonesians live on less than US $25 a month according to the Statistics Agency. Fags are the second biggest household expense after rice.

There’s a price war currently underway with pack contents changing to suit all pockets.  A dozen for Rp 11,000 (an ash-flick above an Aussie dollar) from one brand, with a rival offering 16 for Rp 13,000.  You can’t buy a litre of milk for that money.

The wraps have small health warnings but not the plain packaging introduced in Australia and unsuccessfully challenged by Indonesia in the World Trade Organisation.

Excise on tobacco is just under half the base price though the WHO recommends more than two-thirds. The duties make up between ten and 12 per cent of the national budget.

The government is suffering a massive shortfall in revenue.  An amnesty to persuade citizens to declare money parked overseas scored US $365 billion. The target was five times higher.

 So ramping taxes on smokes could boost the health budget – currently three per cent of GDP and three times less than the OECD average.

But the manufacturers are a powerful lobby able to make reforms disappear in a puff of smoke. .

The big three are Hanjaya Mandala Sampoerna (owned by the US company Philip Morris), Gudang Garam and the Djarum Group.  To sanitise their sickening trade the companies sponsor scholarships, sporting events and pop concerts. 

The ad guys they hire have refined ways to by-pass prohibitions on showing cigarettes by picturing stacks of white coffee cups with the top one frothing.  ‘Mild’ is banned, so they call one product MLD, with the vertical stroke on the second letter highlighted.  Health warnings on TV ads flash so fast they’re illegible.

Some NEVER QUIT signs feature a sweating body builder (the sort who’d never smoke) or master craftsman, so any other interpretations of the message must be malicious misreadings.

There’s no doubt the industry is full of smarties. I once lodged for a month in the Malang home of a fine family where dad was a senior staffer with Rothmans and a good provider.  He never smoked and cautioned his kids against starting. 

But I reckon he should still take a turn in the cancer ward observation room.

First published in On Line Opinion, 21 August 2017:  See

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=19235

FUNNY FIGURES? NOT WHEN THE RISK IS CANCER

Dodgy data bad for your public health                               

There are lies, damned lies and statistics. Numerous claimants to coinage.  Possibly Benjamin Disraeli.

As a trainstopper the intro to an ABC Health and Wellbeing programme last month [aug] couldn’t have been more shocking: 

‘About one in two Australians will be diagnosed with cancer. That means if you don't get it, the person sitting next to you will.’  Later promotions sandwiched ‘during their lifetime’ between the sentences, though it seemed superfluous. 

Will – or may? How could this be? Fifty per cent of the population?  That’s 12 million people. Surgeries and hospitals would crash. 

Cancer is an important issue that demands attention – which it received in the story of a fit young man who cared for his health yet still contracted bowel cancer - but had the ABC got the figures wrong?

Like most Australians I’ve lost friends and relatives to the disease and know others in treatment.  But that’s a small minority of my acquaintances.    

Denise Musto from Audience and Consumer Affairs took a fortnight to reply that the unit was ‘satisfied that the story kept with the ABC’s editorial standards for accuracy’ adding:

‘… the statistic was taken from the Cancer Australia website which states:  ‘In 2016, it is estimated that the risk of an individual being diagnosed with cancer by their 85th birthday will be 1 in 2.’  Then it added a rider: ‘1 in 2 males and 1 in 3 females’.   

So the ground had shifted. The birthday clause was not in the original promotion nor was the gender difference.  But the data was still frightening.

Cancer Australia’s Dr Nerissa Soh said the national government agency got its statistics from on-line books published by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

“In the All Cancers on their Incidence page, there are numbers for the risk of being diagnosed with cancer before the age of 85,” she said. “In 2012 this was 1 in 2 and this risk has been the same since 1987.”

Is risk certainty?  Not in my understanding of language.

Mark Short, Manager of the Australian Cancer Database at the AIHW confirmed his organisation was the source of the figures, but added:

“However, there are some important ‘ifs and buts’ that go along with it which perhaps the ABC programme did not explain. I’m only going to explain the main one to you because the others would be getting into too much nitty-gritty detail.

“Risk of being diagnosed with cancer by age 85 (1 in 2) does NOT (his emphasis) equate to proportion of people 85 and over who have had a diagnosis of cancer. If that were so, as you point out, half of all people 85+ would have had a diagnosis of cancer (before reaching 85), which is clearly not true.

“What the risk figure is saying is, based on the cancer incidence rate statistics we have right now and assuming that they remain the same into the future, a baby born today has about a 1 in 2 chance of being diagnosed with cancer before they turn 85.

“If that person gets cancer they have a fair chance of dying from it before they turn 85 in which case they disappear from the population (or, just to make matters more complicated, they might never be diagnosed with cancer but still die before turning 85).

“So the people who make it to age 85 are not representative of  all the people born 85 years ago; they are the lucky ones, at least as far as longevity goes.

“If you imagine that everyone who dies remains in the population as a zombie (a non-hostile one!), then perhaps about 1 in 2 members of this ‘alive + zombie’ population will have been diagnosed with cancer before turning 85.

“I say ‘perhaps’ because, as mentioned in the first paragraph, there are other ifs and buts that go with the mathematical formula that calculates the risk; the risk figure should be taken as approximate rather than exact.”

From all this hedging it’s clear that the ABC’s original statement is at best open to misinterpretation and most certainly depressingly alarmist. 

The Australian Bureau of Statistics publishes clearer figures gleaned from the census:  ‘In 2011-12 there were 326,600 persons who had cancer, or around 1.5 per cent of the Australian population. This reflects little change from 2007-08.’ 

The real concern that should have drawn the ABC’s attention is this: Despite all the advances in preventative measures, sophisticated treatments, social awareness programmes, massive expenditure and intensive world-wide research the risk of getting cancer has remained the same for the past 29 years.  Why?

Whatever that risk it certainly doesn’t mean that ‘if you don't get it, the person sitting next to you will.'  Unless that person is an octogenarian statistics juggler.  Or a zombie.

(First published in On Line Opinion 14 September 2016:  See:

 http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=18518&page=0

##

.