The 17th World Conference on Tobacco or Health will be held in Cape Town on 7/9 march 2018. In a statement they banned the Foundation for a smoke-free world to attend. We encourage our readers to revisit the rendez-vous with Mike Pertschuk, of December 2001, especially his answer to Question number 5 (also see below after the press release).
WCTOH Statement on PMI's Foundation for a Smoke-free World
Anyone affiliated with Philip Morris International’s Foundation for a Smoke-free World is ineligible to attend the 17th World Conference on Tobacco or Health and will not be admitted.
This statement is a reiteration of the core conference admission policy: Affiliations with tobacco entities (current and / or during the past five years) will make an individual ineligible to attend or present at the conference.
This policy is aligned with the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, Article 5.3, which states in its guidelines: ‘There is a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between the tobacco industry’s interest and public health policy interests.’
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From Rendez-vous 120 with Mike Pertschuk, December 4 2001
Q5. What do you see as the principal lessons we can all learn from what you view as failures of leadership, both among those who supported the McCain bill - even with its liability "cap" provisions- and those who opposed the bill so long as any liability relief was provided the companies?
MP: In Chapter 36 of the book, "Thirteen Ways to Lead a Movement Backward", I spell out thirteen generic lessons I believe can be drawn from the events chronicled that might help guide the movement in the future. Of course, one would need to read the chapter to get a full accounting of what I mean by them, but their headings will give a pretty good sense of them. They are:
1. Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Or Talk! Talk! Talk! Talk!
2. Take no risks.
3. Keep doing what you have been doing no matter how the world is changing.
4. Lose track of your fundamental goals.
5. Never set priorities.
6. Let your strategic thinking be captive to mind-numbing metaphors.
7. Beguile yourself with the illusions of an endless summer of momentum.
8. Resolve good faith strategic differences with your allies by plugging your ears and shouting them down
9. Neglect to convince your grass roots followers that your vision of victory is not their nightmare of defeat.
10. Be united even in folly.
11. Follow your followers over the cliff.
12. Never learn from looking back.
13. Let your outsize ego be your guide.
I have no doubt that almost everyone involved in at least some aspect of the settlement battles will bristle at least some of these lessons, softened, I hasten to add, from the earlier, intemperate title: "Fourteen Ways to lead a movement over a Cliff."
Now many of these lessons fall into the category of things we know, but never learn. And for most of them it is true that they are far easier to name, than to practice.
Nothing in policy advocacy, for example, is harder than to know when to to fight, and when to negotiate. Most great social movement leaders, from India's Ghandi and Ireland's Michael Collins to Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela pursued a long-term strategy which can be encapsulated as "Fight! Fight! Talk. Talk"
With courage and persistence, they would fight oppressors for decades, sometimes violently, sometimes non-violently. And then, when they sensed that the time was right, they sat down across a table and made peace.
Nothing could be harder. In his autobiography, Mandela confesses that he deliberately kept his negotiations with the Apartheid regime secret because he feared that his comrades in arms were not yet ready for negotiating with the hated forces of Apartheid.
It is never easy for warriors to transform themselves into peacemakers, to shift from the comfort of combating a securely demonized enemy, to the moral ambiguity involved in acknowledging an enemy simultaneously as a bargaining partner.
So many of our best public health warriors are never able to move beyond "Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!"
But there is another - and equal - failure of movement leadership, which Stan Glantz has identified persuasively in his history of the California Tobacco Wars: that is, the tendency of too many public health advocates to fail to recognize that they are indeed in mortal conflict with an implacable and unscrupulous adversary. As a result, they either fail to fight aggressively at all, or prematurely accept the meager gains of strategy which is all "Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk."
None of this is easy. As one of my beloved law professors used to say, "This is the law - except when it isn't."
I won't try here to discuss all the remaining lessons. But I'd be less than candid if I didn't confess that lately I've been searching for insights into how at least the broadest of these lessons might strike a chord among our far more salient concerns in the wake of September 11 and our subsequent actions against the Taliban.
Then I chanced across these words from the previously unpublished Notes on Prejudice from Isaiah Berlin to a friend in 1981, published in the New York Review of Books for October 18, 2001.
Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups that he or she or they are in the sole possession of the truth and that those who differ with them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: and need restraining or suppressing. It is a terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right: have a magical eye which sees the truth: that others cannot be right if they disagree.
Of course, The Review published this now because it sheds light on the essence of the terrorist mentality - and equally of those among us who look to the Arab world and Islam and see only evil.
But it is also the main thrust of my book. Though I try to make the case that the advocates for the settlement - and the McCain bill that emerged from the settlement - were largely right, and their opponents largely wrong, that conclusion is surely debatable.
What seems to me far less debatable is my more general argument that movement leaders who are consumed not only with righteousness but also with the conviction that those who disagree with them "are wicked or mad" are cancerous to a movement or a society. From Lionel Trilling, I quote the warning that "the highest idealism may corrupt" and that "the moral passions are even more willful and imperious and impatient than the self-seeking passions.'
These insights are more urgent after September 11th than before.
So I hope and pray that the growth of the new civility among us that sprouted in the unlikely soil of New York and spread in the aftermath of September 11th will persist, and will even herald a long-awaited civic revival; that all of us engaged in good and noble work will make greater space for honest disagreement among us. And that the end result will be the finding of common ground and common cause, in our daily work, and in our work for the survival of the world's civilizations.
Thank you Mike for taking the time to be with us today.
P.S: Smoke in their eyes is published by Vanderbilt University Press.
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=082651393X/tobacc
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