Here Are The Leaders Of STOP: Bloomberg's $20 Million Tobacco Watchdog
STOP has just started and aims to bring new meaning to the phrase "asking for a light," when it comes to smoking.
STOP is an acronym for a new $20 million Bloomberg Philanthropies initiative to create a global watchdog to shed more light on the tobacco industry's complex marketing and sales practices. The full STOP is "Stopping Tobacco Organizations and Products." Back on March 7 at the 2018 World Conference on Tobacco or Health, billionaire philanthropist Mike Bloomberg announced the opening of a competition to lead STOP. Teams comprising of up to 3 different organizations could apply as long as at least one organization was based in a low- or middle-income country since low and middle countries have recently become targets of tobacco companies. And yesterday, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced the following winning team:
- The Tobacco Control Research Group at The University of Bath, which is located in Bath in the United Kingdom. This group has already been running a website entitled tobaccotactics.org that provides information on, you guessed it, the tobacco industry's tactics. And there is no shortage of material. The website includes a list of known lobbying groups for the tobacco industry and a list of organizations and people that may have facilitated the tobacco industry's efforts. Such lists can be quite enlightening since tobacco-related efforts and organizations don't necessarily have obvious sounding names such as "Try to Get People to Smoke, LLC." For example, Swedish Match may sound like a dating website for Swedish people but is instead a tobacco company, according to the website...