ADVOCATES WARY OF BIG TOBACCO GIANT’S PLEDGE TO QUIT CIGARETTES.

Few industries are as vilified as Big Tobacco, and for good reason — its products are the single largest cause of cancer, and are behind a host of other diseases that kill with abandon.

But the sector’s numberone player — Philip Morris International (PMI) — is trying to shed that image with a surprising new PR offensive that foresees a “smokefree” future for the firm, a time when it quits selling cigarettes.

Tobacco corporations, of course, have a long history of trying to manipulate public opinion, often by minimizing the hazards of smoking.

But there may be at least a smidgen of substance to the campaign launched late last month — even if Philip Morris continues for now to sell billions of cigarettes a year.

The company’s new approach is based not on denying the habit is deadly, but on promoting new products designed to give customers a hit of nicotine while leaving out the disease- triggering chemicals. Those alternatives include e- cigarettes and something called iQOS, which heats up tobacco but doesn’t burn it and produce toxic smoke.

“Our vision … is t hat these products will one day replace cigarettes,” Philip Morris says on i ts overhauled website.

Rothman’s Benson and Hedges, PMI’s Canadian subsidiary, is fully on board with that vision — “to eventually eliminate cigarette usage, eliminate smoking,” managing director Peter Luongo told the National Post.

“And we are going to do everything in our power to make that a reality.”

The company hopes smoke- free alternatives will take market share away f rom rivals, he acknowledged, but also feels it has a “moral responsibility” to offer them.

Most anti- smoking advocates are understandably skeptical.

Despite the pledge, Philip Morris not only continues to sell more cigarettes than anyone else, it advertises tobacco in places where that’s allowed, and actively opposes government curbs on tobacco use, noted Rob Cunningham of the Canadian Cancer Society.

“It’s their latest publicrelations effort and it’s without credibility,” he said of the PMI project.

“As they have for decades, they’re engaging in doublespeak.”

Some anti- smoking campaigners, however, are not so quick to discount the company’ s lofty declarations.

Whatever PMI’s mo- tives, the plan is a “huge opportunity” to transform the market, and should be cautiously embraced — not rejected because of Big Tobacco’s sins, argues David Sweanor, a lawyer with the University of Ottawa’s Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics.

Taxes could be increased on cigarettes, for instance, as smoke- free options grow in popularity, making the devices more competitively priced and speeding along the transition, he said.

If governments implement such policies“we get a revolution,” Sweanor predicted. “There are lots of reasons to believe it can be done, it’s a matter of, ‘ Do we facilitate it?’”

Pippa Beck, a senior policy analyst with the Nonsmokers Rights Association, agreed that PMI’s campaign is an opportunity to exploit, though very carefully.

“We can be cynical and dismiss it as nothing more than a PR ploy, but I think we’d be doing ourselves a disservice,” she said.

Underpinning the new public- relations blitz is the $ 2 billion that PMI says it has invested in new technology. The showcase item is the iQOS, similar to e- cigarettes but touted as offering an experience closer to smoking.

The pen- shaped device heats the tobacco to just one- third the temperature reached by burning it in a cigarette.

Users get the taste, the nicotine to feed their addiction but almost none of the dangerous compounds, says PMI.

In Japan, a million smokers have switched to the iQOS, leaving PMI struggling to keep up with demand.

The product has been introduced in B.C., Alberta and Ontario since the new year, said Luongo.

Meanwhile, British-American Tobacco, another industry giant, has developed a similar device, soon to hit the market.

But as the business pays lip- service to smokeless alternatives, even Philip Morris has yet to indicate when — if ever — it will actually stop selling tobacco, noted Neil Collishaw, research Director, Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada.

“After several decades watching these guys operate, I’m compulsively suspicious,” he said.

Collishaw suggests the government force tobacco companies to reduce sales of cigarettes as new alternative products are introduced, rather than wait for people to organically make t he switch.

Rothman’s would support something less draconian— taxes that are set according to a product’s risk — and wants the right to advertise the relative health advantages of iQOS, said Luongo.

But asked if he expected to see the company stop selling cigarettes under his watch, or in his lifetime, the executive was non- committal.

“I would love to be here when that happens,” Luongo said.

THEY’RE ENGAGING IN DOUBLESPEAK.