Lemme put it this way :
Just pretend you're the CEO of some major player of BT or BP, profits are rolling, your shareholders are all smiles, you get to collect your fat bonus, your contacts in the various government offices know which side of the bread is buttered and are mostly docile. Well that 206 billion caper, so what, every tax hike you add a little on top for the company and you're raking it back in from your hooked consumers - a dime at a time.
Sure, there is some more heat on the home turf but the offshore markets come along nicely. Let them smoke plenty in the slums of Calcutta, the favelas of Rio, the shantytowns all over Africa. Most of your consumers won't get old enough to die from smoke-related health problems in this kind of environment and compared to the domestic landscapes, political favours there can be had for a pittance...
Clean sailing all the way , yet here and there you keep hearing about some gee-gaws called 'electronic cigarettes' , surely some other cheap Chinese trinkets like the tons and thousands of rip-off products that are being churned out by the shipload and keep pouring into the country. Nothing to worry about. But sales stagnate and oddly enough, it isn't these gullible ANTZ-outfits ( which you're financing on the sly to keep an inside track on their doings) that are scoring unwelcome successes.
So you start looking and listening and you realize, that these odd-looking niche products are evolving at an alarming speed. Heck, cigarettes are cigarettes. Fermented tobacco leafs chopped up and rolled into a paper. Been like that for ages. How dare they !
Hitech against a venerable proven product. Quietly, you check into it. Online, b&m, it keeps popping up like mushrooms after a warm rain.
And what's worse, the fish seem to have found a way to get off the hook.
Like any good CEO, you've read your SunTsi too and thus proceed to analyze the opponent. Liquids and hardware gets bought up discreetly and shipped to your laboratories. As these are your very own labs, nay results or findings are yours as well. Keep 'em hidden in the bottom drawer, publish them in part or whole, your decision. And the instreuctions are clear: Test it, test it, test and then test it some more. As you're a purveyor of one of the most toxic products ever made for human consumption, you do know that you're likely to end up second best in any comparison. If they'd find anything, you have the right contacts to make sure that publicly funded research gets pointed in the right direction to arrive at the desired 'findings'.
Too late now to put a 'spin' on the science, too many independent and thus uncontrollable researchers have gone public and confirmed on their own what your eggheads told you. That your tobacco sticks don't look too good and sales for e-cigs are gaining momentum. Grass roots, mom-and-pop stores, nothing that couldn't be handled by a corporate monolith---Spread lies, half-truths, keep a lid on the more inconvenient findings. Lots a funding went into 'maintenance of media', time to call in a few debts...
There is one nice hook left : These odbballs aren't buying my stuff, but they aren't buying these NRT-products either, and every time, one of these 'starter kits' gets passed over the counter, Unca Sam will be short some tax dollars in the till... Time to make phone calls, time to gear up the disinformation machine. You know how to run it, 's been done for many yers before you got caught lying and got stiffed out of 206 billion... After all, neither you nor Unca Sam could say outright that we don't give a rat's behind about your health.
Been potty-training all these ANTZ outfits to holler 'health' 'health' 'health', while we just raised to taxes to compensate for those sheep who actually did jump the pen. Kept things nicely balanced. Unca Sams rake fairly stable at 17billion per year, most of it going out the other door to the pals from BP...Now these screwballs come along and upset the apple cart. Hm, maybe we should hedge our bets, let's see who of thse e-cig makers are up for grabs....
