An Indonesian woman exhales cigarette smoke into the mouth of a gaunt, naked patient at a Jakarta clinic, where tobacco is openly touted as a cure for cancer.
The Western patient is suffering from emphysema, a condition she developed from decades of smoking. Along with cancer and autism, it’s just one of the ailments the Griya Balur clinic says it can cure with cigarettes.
“I missed this,” says the woman, a regular customer, with a US accent, as Phil Collins’ I Can Feel It blares in the background.
Warning: Smoking can damage your health
Photo: AFP
Griya Balur would be shut down in many parts of the world, but not in Indonesia, one of the developing-country new frontiers for big tobacco as it seeks to replace its dwindling profits in the health-conscious West.
Long traditions of tobacco use combined with poor regulation and the billions of dollars that flow into government coffers from the tobacco industry mean places like Griya Balur go unchallenged.
The “treatment” for the emphysema sufferer includes the blowing of smoke from “divine cigarettes” infused with “nanotechnology” to remove their cancer-causing “free radicals,” through a tube into her diseased lungs.
Smoke is also blown into her ears and nose, while she holds a cup of aspirin over her right eye. The Phil Collins music, it seems, has no curative properties.
Griya Balur founder Gretha Zahar told reporters she had treated 60,000 people with tobacco smoke over the past decade. With a PhD in nanochemistry from Padjadjaran University in Bandung, West Java, Zahar believes that manipulating the mercury in tobacco smoking can cure all diseases such as cancer and even reverse the ageing process.
“Mercury is the cause of all illnesses. In my cigarettes — we call them ‘Divine Cigarettes’ — there are scavengers that extract the -mercury from the body,” she said.
On her Web site, she says she does not need to subject her theories to clinical tests or publish them in peer-reviewed journals, nor does she have the money to “fight” with “Western medical scientists.”
Zahar’s claims were recently presented to the Constitutional Court, where farmers and legislators from the tobacco-growing hub of Central Java are challenging a law that recognizes the leaf as addictive.
Aris Widodo, a pharmacology professor at Brawijaya University in Malang, East Java, told the court that he had never heard of anyone dying from smoking. On the contrary, he said, smoking was good for you.
“Smoking can eliminate anxiety, sharpen concentration and calm the nerves. It’s a good, cheap alternative to other expensive drugs, like Valium,” he said.
Tobacco is addictive and -harmful to health, but Indonesians are taking up the habit in ever larger — and younger — numbers, cheered on by the tobacco industry’s aggressive marketing.
Addicts puff everywhere from beauty salons to dentists’ waiting rooms. Parents give cigarettes to toddlers to keep them quiet. Cigarettes are handed out to teenagers along with concert tickets. Laws banning public smoking are rarely if ever enforced and tobacco advertising is ubiquitous on the country’s roadsides and television screens.
Cigarettes cost about US$1 for a pack of 20, yet they are often the second-biggest item of household expenditure after food for the Southeast Asian country’s poorest families.
According to the WHO, smoking rates have risen six-fold in Indonesia over the last 40 years. Smoking kills at least 400,000 people every year and another 25,000 die from passive smoking.
Yet Indonesia is the only country in Asia not to have ratified the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which sets policy recommendations and benchmarks for countries concerned about the health impacts of smoking.
Indonesia’s biggest cigarette manufacturer, PT HM Sampoerna, is an affiliate of Philip Morris International. British American Tobacco bought Indonesia’s fourth-largest cigarette maker, PT Bentoel, for US$494 million in 2009.
The government reaps about US$7 billion a year in excise taxes from the industry, which employs scores of thousands of people around Temanggung in Central Java.
Anti-smoking activists say industry players are dusting off their old marketing playbook to obscure the science and paint smoking as cool, masculine, glamorous and even healthy, especially to women and children. During deliberations of smoking regulations in 2009, a clause stating tobacco’s addictiveness went missing from the final draft. The government said the omission was a mere oversight and later reinserted the clause.
Indonesian Health ministry official Budi Sampurno was questioned, but he says that tobacco companies had nothing to do with it.
“Never. Is there any proof? We have never been approached by tobacco companies. That is not legal practice,” he said.
Hakim Sorimuda Pohan, a Democratic Party legislator who helped draft the Health Law, said there was no doubt big tobacco was behind the shenanigans.
“They did the same thing in 1992. Tobacco companies successfully had the same clause omitted from the law,” he said.
A string of rape and assault allegations against the son of Norway’s future queen have plunged the royal family into its “biggest scandal” ever, wrapping up an annus horribilis for the monarchy. The legal troubles surrounding Marius Borg Hoiby, the 27-year-old son born of a relationship before Norwegian Crown Princess Mette-Marit’s marriage to Norwegian Crown Prince Haakon, have dominated the Scandinavian country’s headlines since August. The tall strapping blond with a “bad boy” look — often photographed in tuxedos, slicked back hair, earrings and tattoos — was arrested in Oslo on Aug. 4 suspected of assaulting his girlfriend the previous night. A photograph
The US deployed a reconnaissance aircraft while Japan and the Philippines sent navy ships in a joint patrol in the disputed South China Sea yesterday, two days after the allied forces condemned actions by China Coast Guard vessels against Philippine patrol ships. The US Indo-Pacific Command said the joint patrol was conducted in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone by allies and partners to “uphold the right to freedom of navigation and overflight “ and “other lawful uses of the sea and international airspace.” Those phrases are used by the US, Japan and the Philippines to oppose China’s increasingly aggressive actions in the
‘GOOD POLITICS’: He is a ‘pragmatic radical’ and has moderated his rhetoric since the height of his radicalism in 2014, a lecturer in contemporary Islam said Abu Mohammed al-Jolani is the leader of the Islamist alliance that spearheaded an offensive that rebels say brought down Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and ended five decades of Baath Party rule in Syria. Al-Jolani heads Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is rooted in Syria’s branch of al-Qaeda. He is a former extremist who adopted a more moderate posture in order to achieve his goals. Yesterday, as the rebels entered Damascus, he ordered all military forces in the capital not to approach public institutions. Last week, he said the objective of his offensive, which saw city after city fall from government control, was to
‘KAMPAI’: It is said that people in Japan began brewing rice about 2,000 years ago, with a third-century Chinese chronicle describing the Japanese as fond of alcohol Traditional Japanese knowledge and skills used in the production of sake and shochu distilled spirits were approved on Wednesday for addition to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list, a committee of the UN cultural body said It is believed people in the archipelago began brewing rice in a simple way about two millennia ago, with a third-century Chinese chronicle describing the Japanese as fond of alcohol. By about 1000 AD, the imperial palace had a department to supervise the manufacturing of sake and its use in rituals, the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association said. The multi-staged brewing techniques still used today are
RSS