GENEVA, Switzerland—The Swiss will vote Sunday on whether to tighten their notoriously lax tobacco laws by banning virtually all advertising of the health-hazardous products.
Switzerland lags far behind most wealthy nations in restricting tobacco advertising—a situation widely blamed on hefty lobbying by some of the world’s biggest tobacco companies headquartered in the country.
Currently, most tobacco advertising remains legal at a national level, except on television and radio, or ads that specifically target minors.
While some Swiss cantons have introduced stricter regional legislation and a new national law is pending, campaigners insist much tougher restrictions are needed to protect young people from falling into tobacco addiction.
Under Switzerland’s direct democracy system, the campaigners gathered enough signatures to call a popular vote on their initiative to ban advertising of tobacco products wherever minors might see it.
Recent polls indicate a significant majority of voters favor the initiative, which in practice would effectively ban all tobacco advertising.
But while winning a majority of votes may be easy, it could be more challenging to win over enough of Switzerland’s 26 cantons to secure the double-majority needed for the initiative to pass.
Opponents of the initiative, who include the Swiss government and parliament, say it goes too far.
“This initiative is extreme,” said Patrick Eperon, a lobbyist with an employer organization and a spokesman for the “No” campaign.
By banning basically all tobacco advertising in the name of protecting children, “it infantilizes adults,” he told AFP.
His concerns echo those voiced by Philip Morris International (PMI), the world’s largest tobacco company, which, like British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco, is headquartered in Switzerland.
“This is a slippery slope as far as individual freedom is concerned,” a spokesman for PMI’s Swiss section told AFP.
It “paves the way for further advertising bans on products such as alcohol or sugar,” he said, acknowledging the company has provided funding to the “No” campaign.
The slippery slope argument figures prominently in ads against the initiative, which feature a large crossed-out sausage, suggesting meat adverts, too, could soon be on the chopping block.
Jean-Paul Humair, who heads a Geneva addiction prevention center and serves as a spokesman for the “Yes” campaign, flatly rejected that comparison.
“There is no other consumer product that kills half of all users,” he told AFP.