Professor Ruth Malone is a shareholder looking forward to the day her company stocks are worthless. FIONA CASSIE learns more about the leading US tobacco industry researcher, nurse activist, ex-smoker, and tobacco company shareholder.
Ruth Malone bought her solitary share in tobacco giant Philip Morris back in 2004.
She and her fellow Nightingale Nurses activists are the kind of shareholders that Big Tobacco companies would be happy to be without.
For nearly every year since, nurses have turned up to tobacco company shareholder meetings not to hear profit forecasts, but to speak out against the continued marketing and promotion of tobacco products.
“The tobacco industry spends more than $1 million an hour to suggest that cigarette smoking is cool, glamorous, and fun,” says the website of Nightingales Nurses. “In contrast, we bear witness each day to the suffering and devastation wreaked by tobacco on our patients and their loved ones.”
Professor Malone, the founder of Nightingale Nurses, was recently brought to New Zealand by Smokefree Nurses and ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) in support of the government-backed aspirational goal of a Smokefree New Zealand by 2025.
Malone is editor of the BMJ’s Tobacco Control journal and chair of the University of California San Francisco’s social and behavioural sciences research department. For nearly 15 years, she has been researching the tobacco industry’s strategies – past and present – to undermine and thwart public health efforts to control tobacco’s harm.
This has included wading through the 70 million or so pages of tobacco industry documents released in the wake of the major US court cases in the late 1980s.
“We knew they weren’t good guys, but we didn’t really realise what they actually have done,” says Malone. Big Tobacco’s actions have included labelling public health organisations as the anti-tobacco industry (or ATIs) and engineering cigarettes to make them more addictive.
“I think the Nightingales started because I came across in the documents a whole trove of letters written to tobacco companies by the families and loved ones of people who were dying or had died from tobacco.”
Her response to the gut-wrenching letters was to buy shares in the “bad guys”. Just one share each in US tobacco giants Philip Morris, R J Reynolds, and Philip Morris International.
The shares, and similar single shareholdings by fellow Nightingale Nurse activists, mean they get the right for themselves or a proxy to attend the annual shareholders meeting. Around a dozen nurse activists attend, and as many of them as possible try to make statements during the short ‘open mike’ forum.
“Sometimes they have sort of blocked-off chairs, so it’s harder for us to get up to the microphone,” says Malone.
Last year, a Nightingale oncology nurse’s statements went viral around the world after her telling of a patient’s story – about how they’d found quitting cigarettes tougher than quitting crack – prompted Philip Morris International CEO to quip that while tobacco was addictive, “it is not that hard to quit”.
Malone says of course smokers know the truth about nicotine addiction. However, it was particularly satisfying that a nurse captured the headlines and nurses were seen as not just giving people pills in hospitals but also calling for social justice for people harmed by tobacco.
“There’s no question that tobacco is a social justice issue.”
With smoking rates dropping in western countries, she points to how the industry is now aggressively marketing in Asia and Africa – and to women in countries where women have traditionally not smoked in great numbers.
Tobacco companies are also trying to rebrand themselves as ‘socially responsible’ by funding environmental groups, hospitals in Africa, and website advice to parents on how to stop their children smoking.
Malone smoked for 16 years and says one of the reasons she finally quit was an industry ‘denormalisation’ campaign in California that made her see that smoking wasn’t just about her and her ‘weakness’.
“It was also about an industry that had gone after me and others.”
Her personal focus is not on helping other smokers quit but researching and ‘denormalising’ an industry that profits from a legal and lethal drug.
While smoking cessation efforts are important, she would love to see more nurses involved in ‘changing the conversation’ to denormalise the industry and in backing policy action so people can’t continue to argue, “if tobacco’s that bad, why do we sell it on every street corner”.
She believes helping people to quit one-by-one won’t be enough to meet New Zealand’s Smokefree 2025 goal.
“Policy measures are the most effective for really rapidly reducing tobacco consumption and rapidly reducing uptake”.
Taking cigarettes out of public view from July 1 is a good step in her opinion, and she hopes New Zealand will bring in plain packaging, which will eliminate the marketing messages that currently get reinforced 20-25 times a day when people reach for a cigarette.
She says, realistically, some people will continue to use tobacco down the line, but the “basically free promotion and sales everywhere” of tobacco can’t continue.
Until then, Nightingale Nurses will keep bearing witness to tobacco’s victims at the annual shareholder meetings.
“Because someday – and I don’t know whether it will be in my lifetime – we will look back on this as an historic artefact and ask, ‘what were they thinking that they let this go on so long?’,” says Malone.
When they do, there will be at least some history that nurses made their voices heard.
Ruth Malone’s Auckland presentation of “Ten things every nurse should know about tobacco companies” is available to view at:http://ondemand.aut.ac.nz/Mediasite/Play/4b655ffd89c24236a63917f43aa606401d?catalog=b614bc65-0be5-4c0d-a66c-83cbc8a2d011
Smokefree 2025 Goal
• That almost no-one (less than 5% of the population) will be smoking by 2025.
• That it will be very difficult to sell or supply tobacco.
Source: Health Sponsorship Council website
