Editorial: A righteous war on evil weed

Four hundred years ago this year, John Rolfe, an enterprising 24-year-old from Norfolk, arrived in the fledgling settlement of Jamestown in the English colony of Virginia. A canny businessman despite his tender years, he saw a chance to make a few bob on an old plant, genus Nicotiana, widely referred to at the time as "brown gold".

He bore no royal blessing for his enterprise; indeed, five years earlier, the King of England, James I, for whom the new settlement was named, had written an angry polemic, entitled A Counterblaste to Tobacco, in which he had condemned the "filthy novelty" as "a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the Braine [and] dangerous to the Lungs." Undaunted Rolfe established a plantation and is credited with being the first commercial producer of tobacco in the English Americas.

The King had a point, but no one was listening. The trade is now worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year and is the leading cause of preventable death in every country of the world.

Almost half a century has elapsed since medical opinion became unanimous on the damage caused by smoking. But only in the last decade or so has the tobacco industry really started to feel the heat. A "master settlement" in the US in 1998 consolidated a host of lawsuits into an agreement that required the four big tobacco companies to shell out more than US$200 billion ($280 billion) over 25 years. It was an agreement that the companies would not have entered into if they had not felt the icy winds of change.

At this end of the world, we have not been sitting on our hands. The Smokefree Environments Act 1990 - the work of Helen Clark when she was Minister of Health in the Fourth Labour Government - and a 2003 amendment, made New Zealand one of the earliest adopters of anti-smoking legislation. It caused a few ructions, but few of us would want to go back to allowing smoking in the office now.

Yet there remains much to be done, as Hone Harawira knows. The Maori Party MP said this week that the Maori Affairs parliamentary select committee, of which he is the deputy chairman, will hold an inquiry into the impact of tobacco use on Maori and he wants tobacco company executives to appear before it.

His stand is essentially symbolic. He knows that select committees do not have the power of summons; the Speaker can require attendance, but he must be convinced that all other avenues have been exhausted.

But Harawira, a reformed smoker himself, says he wants to do anything to put tobacco companies under the spotlight.

That desire is entirely consistent with his mandate as the MP for Te Tai Tokerau. Smoking rates in the population at large are falling and are now under 25 per cent; but around around 50 per cent of Maori adults smoke and the rate among young Maori females is even higher, and growing. More than 30 per cent of Maori deaths are from smoking-related diseases.

The tobacco companies will assuredly not answer the call to appear before the committee - fronting up is not in their corporate nature - but Harawira's determination to put the acid on them deserves applause.

It is also in tune with pressure on tobacco coming from other quarters. A Public Health Association conference in Dunedin this month discussed proposals to license tobacco retailers; to ban sales near schools; to require plain packaging bearing only health warnings; and make it easier to sue tobacco firms.

Campaigners are fond of referring to this as the "endgame" of tobacco and are talking about ending the sale of the substance within a decade. It sounds ludicrous, but it makes sense: this is a product which, used in accordance with the manufacturers' instructions, is always harmful to health and typically lethal. If it were invented today, it would be banned.

The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan became the world's first smokefree nation when it banned the sale and public consumption of tobacco almost five years ago. People who argue that it couldn't happen here should think again. In 1980, no one would have imagined this country would have smokefree workplaces, never mind bars.