Healthy profits or people?

Nicotine is an insidious drug that ensnares people with remarkable effectiveness, and yet despite increased awareness of the perils of tobacco addiction, Lebanon is still hooked. The tobacco industry is sustained through a combination of dogged lobbying from the industry big guns, a pliant government that listens to them and a citizenry that puffs its way through, on average, more than twelve packets of cigarettes per month. Lebanon may have ratified the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in 2005, but the all too familiar tradition of putting pen to paper but not policy into practice was adopted. The major tobacco corporations continued to enjoy significant influence within the government and the nation remained virtually devoid of any tobacco control policy.  In September last year, the prevailing winds started to shift course with the passing of a tobacco control law. Advertising, promotion and sponsorship of tobacco products have