Bobby and Phillip

Meet Bobby. Bobby was a quarterback on the University of Virginia football team in the early 1990s who threw 24 touchdown passes - a pretty good record I would say, the sign of consummate athlete. We are told that Bobby is now a senior specialist in the Marketing & Promotional Services at the company that posted his bio on their Website. His role is "to ensure a positive telephone customer experience for Marlboro, Basic, Virginia Slims and Parliament consumers". Bobby works for Phillip Morris, America's largest tobacco company. Why did he sign up? Because " I knew it would be the beginning of a long career filled with opportunities". I see.

"...cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases in smokers. Smokers are far more likely to develop serious diseases, like lung cancer, than non-smokers. There is no safe cigarette." This is from PM's own Website. So is "Our goal is to be the most responsible, effective and respected developer, manufacturer and marketer of consumer products...". According to Allan Brandt (article in Denver Post, March 4th), 450,000 deaths in the US each year are attributable to cigarettes. Although PM has finally acknowledged the harmfulness of cigarettes, it continues to show its "responsibility" by investing $15 billion annually in promotion of cigarettes and increasing the percentage of nicotine in its cigarettes in an effort to stem quitting, and is so successful recruiting "replacement smokers" in foreign lands for the ones that manage to give up in the US that PM International sells four times a s many cigarettes as its American sister company. Brandt points to a WHO report that predicts that tobacco-related deaths in this century will exceed one billion - ten times as many as the century just ended. Which raises the question in my mind - how does anyone who works for PM sleep at night?

A word of advice to Bobby on his employment with PM - just quit.