How tobacco companies stopped airlines banning smoking
A German newspaper, working with the German tobacco industry stopped Lufthansa from banning inflight smoking.
This was in the early 1990,s according to analysis of internal tobacco company documents. The tobacco company Philip Morris has had to publish thousands of internal documents on the internet as a consequence of a US court sentence against it in 1998. A paper in a German public health journal has used the documents to shed light on the tobacco industry's successful lobbying strategies in Germany.
The documents also show how the German Association of the Cigarette Industry (Verband der Cigarettenindustrie) managed to prevent a ban on tobacco advertising, to persuade the German government to bring action against certain EU guidelines, to keep cigarette vending machines accessible to children, and to prevent the introduction of higher taxes on tobacco products. They also show how scientists and doctors acted as expert witnesses against the dangers to health of tobacco.
Lufthansa did not manage to ban smoking on domestic flights until 1996, but first tried in 1989. The airline at the time was partly government owned, and the tobacco industry brought political pressure to bear.
The German newspaper Bild was complicit in this - its editor at the time a fervent smoker who ran editorials decrying the airline's attempted smoking ban.
