SIR - The tobacco companies are at it again, lobbying the politicians to ensure as few legal changes are made as possible, which would undermine their enormous profits from their harmful products.
A new report has revealed that, recently, they’ve been taking things to “unacceptable limits.
The report by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) claims that the tobacco industry sought to “subvert the democratic process “ by deploying a multimillion campaign to influence key figures from MEPs to senior officials in the European Union.
Their intention was to dilute EU measures aimed at making smoking less attractive and forcing manufacturers to place graphic warnings on packs.
The authors of the BMJ report revealed their investigations suggested corporations were being allowed to muster massive influence over the EU.
The Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) was finalised last year when proposals for plain packaging and a ban on point-of-sale displays had been quietly dropped.
David Hornsby, West View Avenue, Wrose
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