From Derek Yach, president, Foundation for a Smoke-Free World

The Foundation for a Smoke-Free World joins other smoking control organizations in condemning the activities of Philip Morris International (PMI) and other big tobacco companies around the world to fight efforts to implement tobacco control measures and phase out combustible cigarettes. Many lives have been lost to delays and obfuscation of science and fact around the deadly impacts of tobacco, and the tobacco industry is directly to blame for that. We call upon the industry to stop these practices and enable constructive tobacco control measures to be implemented in support of WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and other public health initiatives.

Because of the tobacco industry’s decades of deception, the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World wholeheartedly supports the Bloomberg Foundation’s Stopping Tobacco Organizations and Products (STOP) campaign. We applaud the effort to monitor for public deception and “junk science” designed to cover up or mislead the public about the dangers of smoking or alternative products. We encourage independent review of all tobacco control science – including our own—and we encourage all tobacco control researchers to make their raw research data publicly available for secondary analyses, as the Foundation requires of its researchers.