After the April 2002 tobacco tax increase in Alberta - the largest single jump in tobacco taxes ever, anywhere on the planet, according to Health Canada - absolutely devastated some of our friends and family members finances, we went looking for the source of this extremism. What we found was a beaurocratic behemoth called Alberta Tobacco Reduction Alliance (ATRA).
ATRA was created, in 1998, by the Alberta government, as an arms-length front group primarily for the purpose of agitating for and soliciting public support for a number of "tobacco reduction" measures - most importantly a huge increase in tobacco taxes. Alberta Health had discovered that most Albertans, including most non-smokers, weren't very keen on the idea of a whopping huge tax increase, not even on tobacco - and gave the idea an extremely low priority on a list of health-related concerns. Someone in Alberta Health (Gary Mar?) realised that it would be necessary to propagandize and provoke the public into supporting a tax increase, if the government was to claim that it was raising the tax in response to demands from the public, and decided it would be a good idea to create a lobby group which could appear to be a spontaneous "coming together" of concerned health professionals, businesses, community groups and other citizens, and one that could plausibly claim to be an independent non-governmental organization.
Thus ATRA was born, and quickly grew to be; "an alliance of 94 organizations which include: Alberta Medical and Dental associations, Alberta Dental Hygienists Association, Alberta Cancer Board and Alberta Employer Committee on Health Care, the Canadian Cancer Society, Alberta Lung Association, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Alberta, all 17 regional health authorities, various government departments and agencies, and the private sector (Alberta Blue Cross, Alberta Energy Company Ltd., etc.)" and claimed to be; "We are an independent, not-for-profit organization, with a Board of Directors nominated and elected by our membership." and also; "By virtue of these 94-member organizations, we demonstrate credibility in the public eye as an independent, extremely knowledgeable voice on tobacco reduction". There were a number of other member groups, ones that never seemed to be mentioned in ATRA info releases intended for public consumption, which will be very important a bit later in the story.
What did ATRA do? Aside from recruiting all these groups into one huge lobby, ATRA created tv, newspaper and radio ads, an anti-smoking website for school children (where smokers are depicted as zombie-like, repellant, evil beings - much like nazi depictions of jews in the '30s actually - with contests giving away playstation2 video game machines to the kids who recruited the most other children to come and view ATRA's propaganda), relentlessly demonized smokers and smoking to members of the public, advocated the use of punitive measures to reduce tobacco use, and solicited members of the public to "sign-up" as supporters of a resolution calling on the Alberta government to institute a series of coercive and punitive measures collectively known as a "comprehensive tobacco reduction strategy". Not surprisingly, the centerpiece of this "strategy" was...huge tobacco tax increases.
Where did the money come from, to do all this? The money to pay 3-4 full-time employees as much as $100,000/year plus full benefits? The money to hire professional consulting firms like Chan-Durrant Ltd, and professional public relations firms like CalderBateman Communications? The money to pay Les Hagen, executive director of Action on Smoking and Health, to be a public policy consultant. Well; "ATRA receives $1 million annual funding from the Alberta Government and approximately $200,000 annual funding from grants and our member organizations."
Now, just to be certain no one misses the point, here - the Alberta government created a massive lobby group and paid it $1 million/year from 1998 to 2002, to have that lobby group artificially whip up public support and demand for a huge tax increase, and then that lobby group aggressively lobbied the Alberta government for such a tax increase, and claimed to be doing so in response to overwhelming demand for such a tax, from the public! But, it gets worse...
The rarely mentioned members of the ATRA coalition, included all the major drug companies that were makers of smoking-cessation products at that time. All of them were described as "partners" in the coalition, and all of them contributed money to ATRA. Now, what do most smokers do when faced with some Orwellian government measure such as the biggest tax increase the world has ever seen ? They attempt to quit smoking of course. And how will most of them attempt to quit? By buying smoking-cessation products, naturally. This is still not the full extent of the scam, though. It turns out that, puffing up the numbers of "ordinary citizens" who signed-up to support ATRA's resolution calling on the government to raise tobacco taxes, were almost fifty privately owned pharmacies - the people who sell smoking-cessation products at the retail level!
And now the kicker, the most obscene thing about this entire greedy scam. ATRA's own documents and publications on nicotine addiction were quite explicit about the realistic chances of smokers who attempt to quit. When taken together and pared down to the basics, ATRA's own documents showed that less than 5% of the smokers who attempt to quit at any given time, using any method including smoking-cessation products, will become long-term non-smokers. "We are doing this to help people become non-smokers" they cheerfully proclaimed, as their "partners" and "supporters" drove truckloads of our money to the bank, and the Alberta government banked an increase of $300 million in tax revenue - but all the time they knew, that only a tiny tiny portion of smokers would actually become non-smokers as a result of this horrific tax increase.