Tobacco Industry

Many U.S. officials still see cigarette exports as strictly an issue of free trade and economic fairness, while tobacco industry critics and public health advocates consider it a moral question.

Even the Clinton administration finds itself torn: it is the most vocally anti-smoking administration in U.S. history, yet it has been in the uncomfortable role of challenging or delaying some anti-smoking efforts overseas.

At the same time, fledgling anti-smoking movements are rising up with support from American activists, passing restrictions that in some cases are tougher than those in the United States.

International epidemiologist Richard Peto of Oxford University estimates that smoking is responsible for 3 million deaths per year worldwide; he projects that 30 years from now the number will have reached 10 million, most of them in developing nations.

Asia is where tobacco's search for new horizons began and where the industry came to rely most on Washington's help. U.S. officials in effect became the industry's lawyers, agents and collaborators. Prominent politicians such as Robert J. Dole, Jesse Helms, Dan Quayle and AL Gore played a role.

"No matter how this process spins itself out," George Griffin, commercial counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, told the public affairs manager of Philip Morris Asia in January 1986, "I want to emphasize that the embassy and the various U.S. government agencies in Washington will keep the interests of Philip Morris and the other American cigarette manufacturers in the forefront of our daily concerns."