In 2005, a significant film that clearly brings out the spin and lobbying tactics of tobacco industry opened to a limited release in just five theatres in USA.The film, 'Thank you For Smoking,' through its protagonist, Nick Naylor (enacted by Aaron Eckhart) shows the arm-twisting ways of the mighty tobacco industry.
As New York Times review has put it, it portrays the consistent hunt of a Washington lobbyist for "new and inventive ways to rebrand cancer sticks for public consumption."
The film is based on a satirical novel of Christopher Buckley by the same name, which has received as a harsher critic of tobacco lobbyists.
The powerful influence and interference of tobacco industry yet again gets centre-stage as we observe the 25th year of World No Tobacco Day - a call made by the World Heath Organisation in 1987 to draw global attention to the tobacco epidemic and the preventable death and disease it causes.
The theme this year is “tobacco industry interference” and focuses on the need to expose and counter the tobacco industry's brazen and increasingly aggressive attempts to undermine the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) because of the serious danger they pose to public health.
The global tobacco epidemic kills nearly 6 million people each year, of which more than 600,000 are people exposed to second-hand smoke.
Various programmes and activities are being organised globally today.
In Kerala, the Hon’ble Health Minister Shri.V.S.Sivakumar, who is also the Chairman of Tobacco Free Kerala coalition, inaugurated a state-wide massive programme at Trivandrum. Shri.K.Muraleedharan, MLA presided over the inaugural function.
Protest rallies against public smoking, and start of tobacco cessation counselling services and clinics in nearly 5,000 sub-centres spread across all 14 districts of the state form a part of the day’s agenda.
Experts, researchers, members of the medical fraternity, civil society and students have come together to publicly outcry the domineering methods of the tobacco industry in the interest of public health.
Also see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdp8IZWWAT0
