Some tobacco concerns have their own strategy. One Philippine company in that predominantly Catholic country distributed free calendars bearing a portrait of the Virgin Mary and their cigarette brand logos placed brazenly below the icon. “I had never seen anything like it before,” said Dr. Rosmarie Erben, Asian health adviser for WHO. “They were trying to link the icon motif to tobacco, to make Philippine women comfortable with the idea of smoking.”

In China an estimated 61 percent of the adult men smoke, whereas only 7 percent of the women do. Western tobacco companies have their eyes on the “liberation” of these lovely Oriental ladies, millions of whom were so long denied the “pleasures” of their glamorous Western sisters. One large fly in the ointment, though: The government-​owned tobacco company supplies most of the smokes.

Western companies, however, are gradually prying open the door. With limited advertising opportunities, some cigarette companies look to groom their future customers in a stealthy way. China imports movies from Hong Kong, and in many of them, the actors are paid to smoke​—a soft sell!

With hostility growing on the home front, the prosperous American tobacco companies are extending their tentacles to embrace new victims. The facts show that they have taken deadly aim at the developing nations.

Health officials worldwide sound the warning. The headlines declare: “Africa Battles a New Plague​—Cigarette Smoking.” “Smoke Turns to Fire in Asia as the Cigarette Market Soars.” “Asian Smoking Rates Will Lead to Cancer Epidemic.” “The New Third World Fight Is Over Tobacco.”

The continent of Africa has been battered by drought, civil war, and the AIDS epidemic. Yet, says Dr. Keith Ball, British cardiologist, “Short of nuclear war or famine, cigarette smoking is the greatest single threat to the future health of Africa.”

Multinational giants hire local farmers to grow tobacco. The farmers cut down trees sorely needed for cooking, heating, and housing and use them as fuel to cure tobacco. They grow lucrative tobacco crops instead of less profitable food crops. Impoverished Africans commonly spend a large proportion of their scanty income on cigarettes. So African families wither from malnutrition while the coffers of Western tobacco companies grow fat from the profits.

Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America are all targeted by Western tobacco companies, who see the developing world as one gigantic business opportunity. But teeming Asia is by far the biggest gold mine of them all. China alone presently has more smokers than the entire population of the United States​—300 million. They smoke a staggering 1.6 trillion cigarettes a year, one third of the total consumed in the world!

“Physicians say the health implications of the tobacco boom in Asia are nothing less than terrifying,” reports The New York Times. Richard Peto estimates that of the ten million anticipated smoking-​related deaths each year in the next two or three decades, two million will be in China alone. Fifty million Chinese children alive today may die from smoking-​related diseases, Peto says.

Dr. Nigel Gray summed it up this way: “The history of smoking over the past five decades in China and Eastern Europe condemns those countries to a major tobacco disease epidemic.”

“How can a product which is the cause of 400,000 premature deaths each year in the US, a product which the US Government is trying hard to help its citizens to quit, suddenly become different beyond American borders?” asked Dr. Prakit Vateesatokit of the Anti-​Smoking Campaign of Thailand. “Does health become irrelevant when the same product is exported to other countries?”

The developing tobacco interests have a powerful ally in the U.S. government. Together they have fought to gain footholds abroad, particularly in Asian markets. For years American cigarettes were locked out of Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and other countries, some of whose governments had their own monopolies on tobacco products. Antismoking groups protested imports, but the U.S. administration brandished a persuasive weapon​—punitive tariffs.

From 1985 on, under intense pressure from the U.S. government, many Asian countries have opened their gates, and American cigarettes have been flooding in. U.S. cigarette exports to Asia jumped by 75 percent in 1988.

The glaring message is that smoking brings pleasure, fitness, virility, and popularity. “Where I worked,” said one advertising consultant, “we were trying very hard to influence kids who were 14 to start to smoke.” Advertisements in Asia depict healthy, young Western athletic types romping on beaches and ball fields​—while smoking, of course. “Western models and life-​styles create glamorous standards to emulate,” remarked a marketing trade journal, “and Asian smokers can’t get enough.”

After spending billions of advertising dollars, the tobacco marketers have scored huge successes. A Reader’s Digest special report showed that the rise in the number of young smokers is alarming. “In the Philippines,” says the report, “22.7 percent of people under 18 now smoke. In some Latin American cities, the teen-​age rate is an astonishing 50 percent. In Hong Kong, children as young as seven are smoking.”