Should tobacco and alcohol companies be allowed to influence Australia’s National Drug Strategy?

Becky Freeman; Ross MacKenzie; Mike Daube

doi:10.1071/phrp2721714

RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

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Should tobacco and alcohol companies be allowed to influence Australia’s National Drug Strategy?

Becky Freeman ^A ^* , Ross MacKenzie ^B and Mike Daube ^C

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A School of Public Health, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

^B Department of Psychology, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

^C Public Health Advocacy Institute, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia

^* Correspondence to: becky.freeman@sydney.edu.au

Public Health Research and Practice 27, e2721714 https://doi.org/10.17061/phrp2721714

Published: 15 April 2017

2017 © Freeman et al. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence, which allows others to redistribute, adapt and share this work non-commercially provided they attribute the work and any adapted version of it is distributed under the same Creative Commons licence terms.

Abstract

Formation of Australia’s National Drug Strategy (NDS) included an extensive consultation process that was open not only to community and public health stakeholders, but also to representatives of the tobacco and alcohol industries. Australia is bound by the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which requires governments to protect tobacco control measures from interference by the tobacco industry. NDS consultation submissions made by these conflicted industries are not publicly available for scrutiny. The NDS goals are at odds with the commercial agenda of industries that support regulatory stagnation, oppose and undermine effective action, ignore and distort evidence, and prioritise profits over health.