Dear moderators, colleagues,
Today I’d like to tell you the story of Natasha, a 14 year-old girl growing up somewhere in Europe amid the familiar noise and pressure of adolescent life.
Natasha is a bright but anxious sort of girl who’s starting out on the road to adulthood. She’s openly excited about her possible life choices and career, about the places she’s determined to visit and the people she’ll meet, and yet secretly scared by an unfamiliar and demanding adult world.
She wants to appear more grown-up, more confident, less childlike, to look as though she’s more in control. She worries about her weight and strives to be like the models she sees glamorously portrayed on teenage websites.
Like her friends, she sees the oh-so-enticing and sophisticated cigarette adverts aimed at children like her by world-wide tobacco companies whose expensive research has offered them a window into the minds of Natasha and her friends. And finally, with some hesitation, she tries one.
Of course, it tastes awful. But after a while, she forgets about the taste because it also feels wonderfully rebellious. Her parents hate it, of course, but that just reinforces the attraction, because her parents hate almost everything that she likes. And it helps her to bond with girlfriends who have also taken up tobacco use, so she ignores the health warnings now prominently displayed on the packets.
After all, she’s young and the one thing that young people know for certain is that cancer and death are what happen to old people. In fact, Natasha has become an addict and if she continues to smoke she will have at least a 50/50 chance of dying from the smoke she inhales with such relish.
We’ve known about girls like Natasha for a long time. Perhaps some of us in this room were once very much like her. In fact, Natasha's story could – and does - happen anywhere in the world.
Girls are a critical group for tobacco companies desperate to broaden the market for their noxious products. Marketing departments employing focus groups and other modern sales techniques have been devoted to luring young women. They’ve had some success – in some European countries, more women than men now smoke.
And yet, the anti-tobacco movement has too often considered all smokers as fundamentally the same. Only now is this changing, often as the result of hard work by women’s groups, who point out the simple truth that young women often become addicts for different reasons to young men.
The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, is a 21st century international treaty drafted as a global response to the tobacco trade. It has 180 Parties, representing almost every country in the world. And it contains this, rather technically known as Article 4.2 (d), which emphasizes: the need to take measures to address gender-specific risks when developing tobacco control strategies. And that means this – it means an end to an approach that is gender-blind and the introduction of research and policies for targeted groups.
It’s not just the adolescent Natashas who benefit from it. The winners will also include major groups like woman of reproductive age either using anti-conceptive pills or caring for another life, women in the lower socioeconomic groups who are already exposed to other social determinants of health, women who grow tobacco and carry the burden of adverse health effects of tobacco growing, women in the developing world, where their daughters are already smoking more than them.
It should be obvious that women are best-placed to lead this fight to convince our sisters and daughters and friends that smoking isn’t cool. My own experience may shed some light on this. I was a young cancer research doctor, and pregnant with my second child, when my mother was diagnosed with cancer.
It was a devastating blow and I did everything possible to support her at that incredibly difficult time. Yet it was in some ways a typical story of the responsibilities that women have to shoulder – holding down a job, looking after a sick elderly relative and bringing up a new generation all at the same time.
In my case, the experience motivated me to seek work researching the status of tobacco use and cancer in Brazil, to join the campaign against it and, eventually, to the leadership my own country’s response at the highest levels of my government to chair the negotiations of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
The experience of cancer is particularly severe for families living in poverty, who might already be living close to the edge when a mother or grandmother falls ill with this challenging disease. And imagine how much worse the blow is when her children learn that the illness is wholly avoidable, and that there is actually an industry whose sole aim is to create more addicts, regardless of the human cost.
We need to raise everyone’s eyes beyond the tobacco businesses’ slick marketing and cleverly designed packaging, to the industry puppeteers desperate to suck in more victims.
This struggle isn’t merely an issue about women in leadership roles and women in research, or women’s campaigning groups like INWAT – the International Network of Women Against Tobacco, important though they are. It’s also about persuading an army of women at the grass roots to take the message to their female family and friends, because unlike the tobacco industry, we don’t have the benefit of huge marketing budgets and multi-billion dollar revenues.
What we do have is incredible strength and focus, and multitasking skills. We count on each of you to do your part by helping all Natashas, Marias, Tatianas and Veronicas. Coincidentally, the name of my second child, my daughter Veronica is the same name as the Minister of Health from the Russian Federation, who has shown extraordinary leadership in the implementation of the WHO FCTC in this country, despite attacks from the tobacco industry, and who I thank so much for the invitation to participate in this important Forum.
Dear sisters, tobacco already costs the lives of more than 1.5 million women a year and that’s forecast to rise to 2.5 million a year by 2030. These are terrifying numbers, and enough – I hope – to motivate all of us to renew our efforts to end this pernicious trade.
I call you all to consider issuing a declaration from this Forum – which I will be pleased to disseminate worldwide - promoting the use of “gender lenses” in your countries’ efforts to curb the tobacco epidemic by implementing the WHO FCTC. The Convention Secretariat and observers to the Conference of the Parties such as INWAT will be ready to support you in this initiative.