The Altria Group, Inc.
Often referred to as “the house the Marlboro Man built”, The Altria Group, Inc. is the world’s largest tobacco company. Altria operates its cigarette business through the companies known as Phillip Morris USA and Philip Morris International, both of which sell Marlboro – the world’s largest selling cigarette brand since 1972 (“The Altria Group,” n.d.). This company controls about half of the US tobacco market. This is also the parent company of Kraft Foods. I chose to do a paper on this particular company because of the practices of lies and deceit that it has followed for many years.
Some of the behaviors that I find socially and ethically irresponsible are that the company continually down plays the addictiveness and severe risk to health that their product can cause. Over the years the company has been under scrutiny for many different things including the practice of employing under age children to hand out cigarettes, falsifying legal and medical documents, and the paying off of political and legal leaders to accomplish the things that it wants done. This corporation has also been listed in the Wall Street Journal as Number 1 in a list of the top 10 worst places for a woman to work because of the fact that there are no women in any upper management positions and they employ nearly 75,000 people in the Philip Morris US plant alone (“Unethical Companies,” n.d.).
At the annual shareholders meeting in 2011, Philip Morris International celebrated a year of growth in spite of the world’s economic crisis. What they failed to mention, however, was the true cost of their profitability. Tobacco kills one person every six seconds. On the average, smokers lose 15 years of life. Tobacco use is leading to higher healthcare costs and lost productivity. Tobacco causes a $500 billion economic drain that is the equivalent to $74 for each person in the world. For every dollar that Philip Morris International made in 2011, health care expenses and lost productivity cost the world’s economy $7.39 (“Challenging Big Tobacco,” 2011). In spite of these astonishing figures, The Altris Group has a history of denying the harmful effects of tobacco. In an interview with Dr. David Kessler, the former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, the public learned how the Philip Morris corporation deceived them. During an investigation by the FDA to determine whether or not nicotine should be considered a drug, Dr. Kessler and his colleagues uncovered some awful truths that were hidden from the public. The company claimed that nicotine was not addictive and that nicotine was not a drug. What they found was nearly 30 years of research by the company stating otherwise. There was research by the company that included such things as how fast it took the brain to receive the effects of the nicotine. It went so far as to determine the actual receptors of the central nervous system that were affected. The tobacco company knew for years before the Surgeon General’s warning in 1964 that this was a highly potent drug, and they hid it so that it could not be regulated by the FDA. The research that was being done by Kessler went on for several years. During his investigation, Dr. Kessler also found out that the tobacco company was creating a hybrid version of the tobacco plant that was highly addictive. This plant was bred specifically for people to become more addicted. This plant was so secret that it was only grown in Brazil so that our Government was not aware of it. Publicly the tobacco company denied altering any of the chemicals in the tobacco and said that they added nothing to it. As the investigation continued, they also found out that they were advertising different cigarettes as “light” version of the product. When they took these samples to the laboratory, they found the opposite to be true. The “light” cigarettes actually contained higher levels of nicotine than the regular cigarettes. This happened on purpose and he began to investigate every aspect of the tobacco industry. The bottom line during the investigation is that they found out that Phillip Morris lied about what they knew to defraud the United States Government.
In 2009, a three judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals supported an earlier decision from a lower court ruling that the cigarette maker had lied to the public in a 50 year conspiracy to defraud the consumer about the health risks of smoking. The court also ordered that the company must publish a corrective statement on the adverse health effects and the addictiveness of smoking and nicotine. They were also order to stop using misleading labels like “low tar”’ “light”, and “mild” since these products are now known to be no safer and less harmful than regular cigarettes and are quite possibly more harmful (“United States vs. Philip Morris,” n.d.).
The tobacco company knows that people wouldn’t buy their products if they told the truth, so they spend more than $13.3 billion dollars a year on deceptive advertising and marketing. This advertising is often targeted specifically to children and young adults. The tobacco industry addicts more than 1000 youth every day. One in three of these children will die prematurely because of tobacco use. As a 1981 Philip Morris marketing report noted, “Today’s teenager is tomorrow’s potential customer” (The FDA Moves to Crack Down,” 2012).
Not only does Philip Morris target children to become addicted to this product, they also employ children in countries where there are no labor laws. In an investigation by Human Rights Watch, it was revealed that there 72 cases of children as young as 10 working very long days in the tobacco fields. This is a job that poses serious health risk, especially to children. Nicotine absorbed through the skin from the handling of the tobacco leaves is the equivalent to smoking 36 cigarettes. These children are also exposed to fertilizer and pesticides (“Unethical Companies,” n.d.).
Amongst the other irresponsible things that Philip Morris is guilty of, they are also guilty of paying off government and public officials. In one case, the Illinois Supreme Court threw out a $10.1 billion dollar lawsuit against Philip Morris and the Altria Group saying that it did not mislead consumers when advertising “light” cigarettes. The Chicago Tribune reported that Philip Morris lawyers contributed $16,800 to help elect the judge that threw out the verdict (“Big Tobacco Spends,” 2012).
Philip Morris is guilty of fraud, negligence, and product liability. This company has murdered people for over 50 years. The have known since the early 1950’s that they had a product that was addictive people and killing them. They continued to sell it and to market it, even to children. They also covered it up and lied for decades. This company should be held responsible for the roughly 100 million people that it has killed since it found out about the harmful effects of its product.

References
A decade of influence. Tobacco money in california politics. (n.d.). Retrieved from The American Lung Association website: http://www.center4tobaccopolicy.org/CTPO/_files/_file/ A%20Decade%20of%20Influence.pdf
The Altria Group. (n.d.). Altria Group Inc. Retrieved from Bloomber Business week website: http://bx.businessweek.com/altria-group/news/
Big tobacco spends $12 million to spread big lies. (2012, March 1). Retrieved from The american cancer society proposition 29 website: http://www.californiansforacure.org/news/news/308?1=1 Chester, C., & Kellett, G. (2011, May 11). Challenging Big Tobacco. Is Philip
Morris Internatinal grasping at straws. Retrieved from Corporate
Accountability International website: http://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/ release-report-philip-morris-international-grasping-straws Dr. David Kessler [biography]. (n.d.). Retrieved from AEI Speaker Bureau website: http://www.aeispeakers.com/speakerbio.php?SpeakerID=558
Interview with Dr. David Kessler. (n.d.). Inside the Tobacco deal. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/interviews/ kessler.html database.
Public Health Law. (n.d.). United States v. Philip Morris (D.O.J. Lawsuit).
Retrieved from William Mitchell College of Law website: http://publichealthlawcenter.org/topics/tobacco-control/ tobacco-control-litigation/united-states-v-philip-morris-doj-lawsuit
The FDA moves to crack down on big tobacco deceiving consumers [press release].
(2012, March 30). Retrieved from The American Lung Association website: http://www.lung.org/press-room/press-releases/ fda-moves-to-crack-down-on-tobacco-ads.html
Unethical companies. (n.d.). Unethical Companies. Retrieved from
http://www.actionforourplanet.com/#/top-10-unethical-companies/4545796858