Thank you, Mr. Chair.
We've been listening to many witnesses before this committee. I've come to a conclusion regarding what this whole thing is about. It's about a society that tells people, “You need more drugs”. Drugs companies and tobacco companies are capitalizing on that and saying, “Here's a cool way to get your drugs. We're going to let society deal with the consequences”.
When I was in the legislative assembly of Ontario, I went into a liquor store one day. They had what I called a children's section. They were marketing to children. They had a “spiked cherry” drink. These are alcoholic drinks with 7% alcohol. They had Mike's Hard Lemonade—with all the sexual connotation. And they had something called Mudslide. I know one girl who got so sick on it one New Year's Eve that she hasn't drunk milkshakes for the last 15 years because they make her want to throw up.
I raised it in the provincial assembly, and we actually banned some of the products, banned some of the names, because we knew they were marketing to children. But here we go again. You have 18% of youth, in one study, who have tried e-cigarettes, and 30% want to. There's no surprise, right?
I get really concerned when I hear about product placement. Movie actors take huge lumps of cash, hundreds of thousands of dollars, to smoke on screen, and the producers take the money to place the brands or the signage. This is when someone's commercial guard is down. They're not watching a TV commercial and saying, “These guys are trying to sell me something”. They're watching a movie and it gets subliminally into their mind. It's a very, very insidious practice.
I note that the drug companies were caught by a whistle-blower, Jeffrey Wigand, who received death threats. He revealed that Brown and Williamson, one of the largest tobacco companies in the States, was actually targeting children, and that it was putting more cancer-causing chemicals and more addictive nicotine in its cigarettes to build its market.
I have just a quick quote. In 1983, Hamish Maxwell, who was president of Philip Morris, directed his marketers—and this is a matter of public record—as follows: “We must continue to exploit new opportunities to get cigarettes on screen and into the hands of smokers.” They spent $2 million a year from 1978 to 1988 doing that when people's commercial guard was down.
I appreciate you coming here and telling us that we, in so many words, need balanced messages. We have to say, “Well it might benefit some people to get off cigarettes, so let's do a lot of studies. Let's do studies and let's find the answers”.
I agree that we have to get the studies done, but when you're giving an intelligent, academic message that is, frankly, mixed and you're up against this tremendous commercial onslaught that's already hit $4 billion a year, I'm concerned that by the time these studies are done, hundreds of thousands more people are going to be addicted to nicotine and to these products.
When you see the number of lives in Canada that have been destroyed by alcohol abuse and tobacco.... People get sick, and there's a whole range of other drugs. This committee just did a study on opioids. Considering the destruction that's happening, which society has to pay for, I think we need clearer warnings. We need to act now and get the warnings out about the health issues.
The advertising we saw today was basically connecting sex and so on with, “Try this drug. Try this device. You're going to be more popular, or you're going to have a happier life” or whatever. The second phase is coming when they already have the devices and they're told, “By the way, you want the real flavour? You want the real experience? Try our cigarettes. Then you're going to get the real...like the ones the adults have.” This is where they're heading, and they do it in such an insidious manner.
Would you consider supporting a law that restricted product placement in movies or in TV shows or at least made producers say at the beginning of the show, “The following companies have paid to place their products in this film or TV show”?