The Second Opium War

This is the chapter of the cigarette story Americans tell least, and it is the one I find hardest to read without anger. It is short, it is fully documented, and it implicates not a shadowy corporation but the elected government of the United States, acting through ordinary trade law, in the open.

Read the overview first if you want the whole arc. This is one clause of it, at depth.

The setup: a closing home market and a few locked doors abroad

By the early 1980s the American cigarette was in slow retreat at home. The 1964 Surgeon General’s report had landed, the warnings were on the packs, the ad bans were biting, and per-capita consumption was sliding. For an industry that needs new smokers the way a fire needs fuel, the domestic outlook was a problem with one obvious solution: sell abroad.

But several of the most attractive markets in Asia were closed. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand each ran a state tobacco monopoly that kept foreign brands out or heavily restricted. These were not health policies, mostly — they were protectionist monopolies. But their effect was that American cigarettes could not easily get in, and behind those walls smoking rates, especially among women, were comparatively low. In several of these cultures a woman smoking carried real social stigma, which is to say the market was undeveloped — exactly the kind of untouched demographic that Edward Bernays had taught the industry to see as opportunity.

The weapon: Section 301

What turned a commercial wish into government policy was a piece of American trade law: Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. Section 301 lets the Office of the US Trade Representative retaliate against foreign trade practices it deems unfair — by imposing tariffs and sanctions on that country’s exports to the US. It is a coercion instrument. You open your market to our goods, or we close ours to yours.

In the 1980s the USTR pointed it at cigarettes. Backed by the political muscle of the tobacco-state senators — Jesse Helms of North Carolina prominent among them — the US Trade Representative threatened Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand with trade sanctions unless they dropped their barriers to American cigarettes. The threat was credible and the asymmetry was total: these were export-dependent economies whose access to the American consumer mattered enormously to them, being told that access was contingent on letting Marlboro in. One after another, the doors opened: Japan in 1987, Taiwan in 1987, South Korea in 1989.

This was the United States government using the threat of economic punishment to force other nations to accept a product its own health authorities were simultaneously, at home, spending public money to discourage. The Surgeon General warning and the Section 301 threat were issued by the same government in the same years. One hand was telling Americans to quit; the other was prying open Seoul and Taipei so the same companies could find replacements.

What it did to people

This was not a victimless transfer of market share. The economists Frank Chaloupka and Adit Laixuthai studied the consequences in a 1996 NBER paper, and the finding is the part that should be on the record. In the markets the US forced open, cigarette consumption did not merely shift from local brands to American ones — total smoking rose above what it would otherwise have been. The aggressive Western-style marketing that arrived with the brands — the billboards, the sponsorships, the glamour aimed precisely at women and young people the domestic monopolies had never bothered to court — expanded the whole market. The forced opening didn’t just change who profited from the cigarettes people smoked. It produced more smokers, and therefore, downstream and on a delay measured in decades, more cancer.

That is the moral core of it. You can argue the trade-law merits all day, but the empirical result was a measurable increase in addiction and disease in four populations, engineered from Washington, on behalf of an industry, against the express health knowledge of the same government.

Thailand said no, and lost on paper

Three countries folded. Thailand fought. When the USTR came for the Thai market in 1989–90, Thailand refused, and it refused on health grounds — invoking the public-health exception in international trade rules and arguing that opening to imports would increase smoking and harm Thais. The Thai government took out full-page ads in American newspapers and testified at congressional hearings in Washington. The World Health Organization backed the health argument.

The dispute went to a GATT panel in 1990 — the trade-arbitration body that preceded the WTO. And here the result is genuinely instructive, more than the simple “Thailand lost” headline. The panel ruled that Thailand could not ban the imports: permitting domestic cigarettes while barring foreign ones was discriminatory and not, in the panel’s words, “necessary” under the health exception, because Thailand had less trade-restrictive ways to protect health available to it. But the same ruling affirmed that Thailand could impose strong non-discriminatory tobacco controls — advertising bans, ingredient disclosure, high taxes — as long as they applied equally to domestic and foreign cigarettes. So Thailand had to take the imports, but it kept the right to regulate them hard, and it proceeded to build one of the more aggressive tobacco-control regimes in the developing world.

That nuance matters, and I won’t flatten it: the trade system did not say “health doesn’t count.” It said “you may protect health, but not by discriminating against imports.” Which is a coherent principle and also, in the specific case, a door held open for an addictive carcinogen by the threat of one superpower’s tariffs. Both things are true. The principle was defensible; the use it was put to was a government acting as a cigarette salesman.

Why the name is fair

Protesters in these countries called the campaign the Second Opium War, and the analogy is sharper than a slogan. In the First Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, Britain used military force to compel China to keep importing the opium that British India produced, because the trade was lucrative and China’s attempts to ban a harmful, addictive drug were bad for British commerce. Replace Britain with the United States, opium with cigarettes, and gunboats with Section 301, and the structure is identical: a powerful nation using its leverage to force a weaker one to keep its market open to an addictive product that the powerful nation profits from and the weaker one’s own government is trying to keep out for the health of its people.

The substitution of trade sanctions for warships is not a softening. It is the same act, modernized — coercion that leaves no wreckage to photograph. That is exactly why it’s the chapter no one tells. There is no battlefield, no treaty of humiliation, no image. There is only a quiet rise in the smoking rate among Korean teenagers and Japanese women in the late 1980s, a curve that bends upward in the data and then, twenty and thirty years on, shows up in oncology wards as a bill that Washington sent and Asia paid.

The next chapter goes further back, to the most disorienting fact in the whole history: that the truth about what cigarettes do to the lungs was established, first and clearly, by scientists working for the Nazi regime — and was lost for a generation because of where it came from.

— Cael